t day after day and cut the wood in
a great swamp a mile behind his house. He stood from morning until
night hewing down the trees, which had gotten their lusty growth from
the graves of their own kind. Their roots were sunken deep among and
twined about the very bones of their fathers which helped make up the
rich frozen soil of the great swamp. The crusty snow was three feet
deep; the tall blackberry vines were hooped with snow, set fast at
either end like snares: it was hard work making one's way through
them. The snow was over the heads of those dried weeds which did not
blow away in the autumn, but stayed on their stalks with that
persistency of life that outlives death; but all the sturdy bushes,
which were almost trees, the swamp-pinks and the wild-roses, waxed
gigantic, lost their own outlines, and stretched out farther under
their loads of snow.

Barney hewed wood in the midst of this white tangle of trees and
bushes and vines, which were like a wild, dumb multitude of
death-things pressing ever against him, trying to crowd him away.
When he hit them as he passed, they swung back in his face with a
semblance of life. If a squirrel chattered and leaped between some
white boughs, he started as if some dead thing had come to life, for
it seemed like the voice and motion of death rather than of life.

Half a mile away at the right other wood-cutters were at work. When
the wind was the right way he could now and then hear the strokes of
their axes and a shout. Often as he worked alone, swinging his axe
steadily with his breath in a white cloud before his face, he amused
himself miserably--as one might with a bitter sweetmeat--with his old
dreams.

He had no dreams in the present; they all belonged to the past, and
he dreamed them over as one sings over old songs. Sometimes it seemed
quite possible that they still belonged to his life, and might still
come true.

Then he would hear a hoarse shout through the still air from the
other side of the swamp, and he would know suddenly that Charlotte
would never wait in his home yonder, while he worked, and welcome him
home at night.

The other wood-cutters had families. They had to pass his lot on
their way out to the open road. Barney would either retreat farther
among the snowy thickets, or else work with such fury that he could
seem not to see them as they filed past.

Often he did not go home at noon, and ate nothing from morn until
night. He cut wood many days