e, which had been more to his liking than any other in the
neighbourhood. I remembered his contented face when he was with us on
Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would
never have happened.

I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to
his own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to
Virginia, to Baltimore--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would
not at once set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted
spirit, so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the
ever-falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb
him. I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly
underground, always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house.
There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr.
Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles
of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting
winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that Antonia
had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how
he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the
friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest
full of game--belonging, as Antonia said, to the 'nobles'--from which
she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a
white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it, he would
be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have
been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air in which
they had haunted him.

It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother
was so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and
while we were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the
state of things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body
until the coroner came. If anyone did, something terrible would happen,
apparently. The dead man was frozen through, 'just as stiff as a dressed
turkey you hang out to freeze,' Jake said. The horses and oxen would not
go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer
any smell of blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man,
because there was no other place to keep them. A lighted lan