With increasing darkness, the blizzard grew in strength and fury. It loosened a clapboard below the east gable, and shrieked through the partial opening. It rattled the window, and tore at the heavy planks on the roof that supported the stovepipe. It blew the snow from the cracks and whistled through them shrilly. It caught the house in its drifts and shook it. The dogs, awakened by the screeching and clash of things, crouched in fright against their masters. Shepherd, pointer, and Indian dogs trembled when the wind moaned, and answered every whine from without with another. The St. Bernard, separating himself from the pack, sprang at a bound to the boarded-up window and, raising his head, uttered long, dismal howls. The big brothers hastened to quiet him, and spared neither foot nor fist; but the dog, eluding them, returned again and again to the window, and mourned with his muzzle to the west. It was while the hurricane was thus raging over the farm-house, and when nothing but a bit of south roof and the tops of the cottonwoods showed that a habitation was there, that the stork alighted. The big brothers were drowsing in the dark about the pipe, with the pack whimpering beside them, and did not know of his coming until, in a sudden lull, there came up through the open trap-door that led to the sitting-room stairs a small, clear, hailing cry. It sounded but for an instant. Then the storm broke again, the windows rattled, the dogs whined, the sleet-charged air boomed and thundered and sucked at the quivering house, and darkness, ever blacker and more terrible, settled down. * * * * * WHEN the neighbor woman came softly up and put her head above the trap-door, she had to call again and again into the gloom, through which the lines of frozen clothes waved faint and ghost-like, before the big brothers awoke and, rising from their cramped positions, groped their way sleepily to the stairs and followed her down. As they reached the sitting-room and stood in a silent, waiting row by the stove, the dogs about them, the neighbor woman tiptoed to the canopied bed in the corner and took up a tiny bundle, which she brought back and laid in the arms of the biggest brother. Then she leaned back, all fat and smiling, as the big brothers bent over the bundle and looked into a wee, puckered, pink face. It was the little girl. II A FRONTIER CHRISTENING THE christening of the little girl began the very morning after the stork flew down through the blizzard and left her. For the three big brothers, rejoicing that they were still only three, got out the almanac, the world's atlas, and the dictionary, went carefully through the first two, read a long list in the back of the last, and wrote down all the names they liked. Then they set about trying to decide upon one.