that winter when the other men thought
the weather too severe and sat huddled over their fires in their
homes, shoving their chairs this and that way at their wives'
commands, or else formed chewing and gossiping rings within the
glowing radius of the red-hot store stove.

"See Barney Thayer goin' cross lots with his axe as I come by," one
said to another, rolling the tobacco well back into his grizzled
cheek.

"Works as if he was possessed," was the reply, in a
half-inarticulate, gruff murmur.

"Well, he can if he wants to," said still another. "I ain't goin' to
work out-doors in any such weather as this for nobody, not if I know
it, an' I've got a wife an' eight children, an' he ain't got nobody."
And the man cast defiant eyes at the great store-windows, dim with
thick blue sheaves of frost.

On a day like that Barney seemed to be hewing asunder not only the
sturdy fibres of oak and hemlock, but the terrible sinews of frost
and winter, and many a tree seemed to rear itself over him
threatening stiffly like an old man of death. Only by fierce contest,
as it were, could he keep himself alive, but he had a certain delight
in working in the swamp during those awful arctic days. The sense
that he could still fight and conquer something, were it only the
simple destructive force of nature, aroused in him new self-respect.

Through snow-storms Barney plunged forth to the swamp, and worked all
day in the thick white slant of the storm, with the snow heaping
itself upon his bowed shoulders.

People prophesied that he would kill himself; but he kept on day
after day, and had not even a cold until February. Then there came a
south rain and a thaw, and Barney went to the swamp and worked two
days knee-deep in melting snow. Then there was a morning when he
awoke as if on a bed of sharp knives, and lay alone all day and all
that night, and all the next day and that night, not being able to
stir without making the knives cut into his vitals.

Barney lay there all that time, and his soul became fairly bound into
passiveness with awful fetters of fiery bone and muscle; sometimes he
groaned, but nobody heard him. The last night he felt as if his whole
physical nature was knitting about him and stifling him with awful
coils of pain. The tears rolled over his cheeks. He prayed with
hoarse gasps, and he could not tell if anybody heard him. A dim light
from a window in the Barnard house on the hill lay into the kitchen
opposite