“Ellum,” said cousin Eli Strobe ruminatively. He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and gazed into the fire with his heavy-lidded eyes. “Ellum,” he repeated, his pipe between his set teeth. “They makes coffins out’n ellum, an’ that’s why they ’low that burnin’ it air a sign o’ death.” Mrs. Bowles looked at her husband for a moment, aghast. “Sim mus’ hev put it on,” said Bowles, weakly seeking to shield himself. Sim was a small carrot-headed boy, whose sullen, watchful eyes and manner, at once cowed and resentful, intimated some harsh dealings of Fate. “It don’t make no diff’ence ef Sim did,” said Teck Jepson. Mrs. Bowles looked at him angrily, apprehending the defiance, but silently; he returned the gaze with steadfast intentness, and she flung petulantly away. “Sim air a bad aig,” she remarked. “I dunno what ailed that ’oman”—thus she always referred to her predecessor—“ter raise her chil’n ter be so mean an’ spiteful. She war a fool, sure!” “Waal, waal,” said the husband and father uneasily, “I reckon she done the bes’ she could.” It was all he dared say in defense of the dead, but urgent conscience constrained this. He often thought of her,—far more often, doubtless, than if his second marriage had been a smoother fate,—and of the terrible winter that she died, when the mountain was sheathed in ice and impassable; no man could come up or go down, and he was isolated in his sorrow. A ghastly gray day it was when he hollowed out with his own hands a shallow grave in the frozen ground, and laid her in it, with only the three babbling children to stand by. It was in some sort as an offering to her memory that he occasionally admitted to himself that his second marriage was a mistake. Sometimes he tried to look upon it as a sacrifice: the children would have frozen stiff, would have starved, would have run wild, with no woman to look after them, he said to himself. And in this half-hearted matrimonial bargain there was a set-off for Mrs. Bowles’s spited lover.