ayer whip that boy?" the doctor had questioned, sharply,
before all the women, and Caleb had sobbed back, hoarsely, "She was
jest a-whippin' of him; I told her she hadn't ought to."

That had been enough. "She whipped him," the women repeated to each
other in shocked pantomime. They all knew how corporal punishment had
been tabooed for Ephraim.

The Thayer house was crowded the afternoon of the funeral. The decent
black-clad village people, with reddening eyes and mouths drooping
with melancholy, came in throngs into the snowy yard. The men in
their Sunday gear tiptoed creaking across the floors; the women,
feeling for their pocket-handkerchiefs, padded softly and heavily
after them, folded in their black shawls like mourning birds.

[Illustration: "The Thayer house was crowded the afternoon of the
funeral"]

Caleb and Deborah and Barney sat in the north parlor, where Ephraim
lay. Deborah's hoarse laments, which were not like the ordinary
hysterical demonstrations of feminine grief, being rather a stern
uprising and clamor of herself against her own heart, filled the
house.

The minister had to pray and speak against it; scarcely any one
beyond the mourners' room could hear his voice. It was a hard task
that the poor young minister had. He was quite aware of the feeling
against Deborah, and it required finesse to avoid jarring that, and
yet display the proper amount of Christian sympathy for the
afflicted. Then there were other difficulties. The minister had
prayed in his closet for a small share of the wisdom of Solomon
before setting forth.

The people in the other rooms leaned forward and strained their ears.
The minister's wife sat beside her husband with bright spots of color
in her cheeks, her little figure nervously contracted in her chair.
They had had a discussion concerning the advisability of his
mentioning the sister and daughter in his prayer, and she had pleaded
with him strenuously that he should not.

When the minister prayed for the afflicted "sister and daughter, who
was now languishing upon a bed of sickness," his wife's mouth
tightened, her feet and hands grew cold. It seemed to her that her
own tongue pronounced every word that her husband spoke. And there
was, moreover, a little nervous thrill through the audience. Oddly
enough, everybody seemed to hear that portion of the minister's
prayer quite distinctly. Even one old deaf man in the farthest corner
of the kitchen looked meaningly at h