d sky, one of
those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.

"That's my place," said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow;
and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not know what to
answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the
house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black
wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin
wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the
wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.

"The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,'
a while back," Frome continued, checking with a twitch of the left rein
the bay's evident intention of turning in through the broken-down gate.

I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was
partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L":
that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main
house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the
wood-shed and cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image
it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the
chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because
of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh
climate to get to their morning's work without facing the weather, it
is certain that the "L" rather than the house itself seems to be the
centre, the actual hearth-stone of the New England farm. Perhaps this
connection of ideas, which had often occurred to me in my rambles about
Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's words, and to
see in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body.

"We're kinder side-tracked here now," he added, "but there was
considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to the
Flats." He roused the lagging bay with another twitch; then, as if the
mere sight of the house had let me too deeply into his confidence for
any farther pretence of reserve, he went on slowly: "I've always set
down the worst of mother's trouble to that. When she got the rheumatism
so bad she couldn't move around she used to sit up there and watch the
road by the hour; and one year, when they was six months mending the
Bettsbridge pike after the floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage
round this way, she picked up so that she used to get down to the gate
most da