thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. "Oh, as to
that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring."

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral
reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had
the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But
one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I
grouped my subsequent inferences: "Guess he's been in Starkfield too
many winters."

Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant.
Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural
delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain
villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and
Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which
the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter
shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow
perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life
there--or rather its negation--must have been in Ethan Frome's young
manhood.

I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big
power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn carpenters' strike
had so delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfield--the
nearest habitable spot--for the best part of the winter. I chafed at
first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually
began to find a grim satisfaction in the life. During the early part of
my stay I had been struck by the contrast between the vitality of
the climate and the deadness of the community. Day by day, after the
December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents
of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an
intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must
quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce
no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of
Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this
phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold;
when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the
devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to
their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its
six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.
Twenty years earlier the means of resist