In the morning the fire was quite out. Stub stretched his stiffened body and gazed about the room. Over on the bed the man did not stir nor speak. The dead bird lay untouched at his side. There was a whine, a bark, and a long minute of apparent indecision; then the dog pattered across the floor, wormed himself through the partly open door, and took the trail that led to the foothills. Three times Stub brought to the fireless, silent cabin the result of his day's hunt and laid it at his master's side, and always there was only silence or a low groan to greet him. On the third night it snowed--the first storm of the season. A keen wind swept down the mountain and played hide-and-seek with the cabin door, so that in the morning a long bar of high-piled snow lay across the cabin floor. When the men from the village had ploughed their way through the snow and pushed open the door, they stopped amazed upon the threshold, looking at one another with mingled alarm and pity; then one of them, conquering his reluctance, strode forward. He stooped for a moment over the prostrate form of the man before he turned and faced his companions. "Boys, he's--gone," he said huskily; and in the silence that followed, four men bared their heads. It was a dog's low whine that first stirred into action the man by the bunk. He looked down and his eyes grew luminous. He saw the fireless hearth, the drifted snow, and the half-dead dog keeping watchful guard over a pile of inert fur and feathers on the floor--a pile frozen stiff and mutely witnessing to a daily duty well performed. "I reckon I'm needin' a dog," he said, as he stooped and patted Stub's head. A Matter of System At the office of Hawkins & Hawkins, system was everything. Even the trotter-boy was reduced to an orbit that ignored craps and marbles, and the stenographer went about her work like a well-oiled bit of machinery. It is not strange, then, that Jasper Hawkins, senior member of the firm, was particularly incensed at the confusion that Christmas always brought to his home. For years he bore--with such patience as he could muster--the attack of nervous prostration that regularly, on the 26th day of December, laid his wife upon a bed of invalidism; then, in the face of the unmistakable evidence that the malady would this year precede the holy day of peace and good-will, he burst his bonds of self-control and spoke his mind. It was upon the morning of the 21st. "Edith," he began, in what his young daughter called his "now mind" voice, "this thing has got to stop." "What thing?" "Christmas." "_Jas_-per!"--it was as if she thought he had the power to sweep good-will itself from the earth. "Christmas--_stop_!" "Yes. My dear, how did you spend yesterday?" "I was--shopping." "Exactly. And the day before?--and the day before that?--and before that? You need n't answer, for I know. And you were shopping for--" he paused expectantly.