m in his weekly contributions to
the sacred funds! As he stood at midnight, in the open door, for the long
draught of fresh air he always took before turning in on his pile of hay,
he heard in the wood on the hill back of the house the shrill shriek of a
trapped rabbit. He plowed furiously out through the deep snow to find it,
gave the tortured animal a merciful death, carried the trap back to the
river and threw it in with a furious splash. He strode home under the
frosty stars, his dirty shirt open over his corded, old neck, his burning
heart almost content. He had done a good day's work.

Early the next morning, his neighbor came to his door, very white, very
hollow-eyed, evidently with a sleepless night back of her, and asked him
for the papers he had read from. Jombatiste gave them to her in a tactful
silence. She took them in one shaking hand, drawing her shawl around her
wrinkled face with the other, and went back through the snow to her own
house.

By noon that day, everyone in the village was thrilling with wild surmise.
Cousin Tryphena had gone over to Graham and Sanders', asked to use their
long-distance telephone and had telephoned to Putnam to come and get her
sideboard. After this strange act, she had passed Albert Graham, then by
chance alone in the store, with so wild a mien that he had not ventured to
make any inquiries. But he took pains to mention the matter, to everyone
who happened to come in, that morning; and, by dinner-time, every family
in Hillsboro was discussing over its pie the possibility that the
well-known _queer streak_, which had sent several of Cousin Tryphena's
ancestors to the asylum, was suddenly making its appearance in her.

I was detained, that afternoon, and did not reach her house until nearly
four; and I was almost the last to arrive. I found Cousin Tryphena very
silent, her usually pale face very red, the center of a group of neighbors
who all at once began to tell me what had happened. I could make nothing
out of their incoherent explanations. ... "Trypheny was crazy ... she'd
ought to have a guardeen ... that Canuck shoemaker had addled her
brains ... there'd ought to be a law against that kind of
newspaper. ... Trypheny was goin' like her great-aunt, Lucilly, that died
in the asylum. ..." I appealed directly to Cousin Tryphena for information
as to what the trouble was.

"There ain't any trouble 's I know of," she answered in a shaking voice.
"I've just heard of a widow-