her Cephas in Seattle.

That letter was finished, eight good quarto pages written, and a long
delayed letter to Emily Tabor, whom Huldah had not seen since she was
married; and a long pull at her milk accounts had brought them up to
date,--and still no John. Huldah had the table all set, you may be sure
of that; but, for herself, she had had no heart to go through the
formalities of lunch or dinner. A cup of tea and something to eat with
it as she wrote did better, she thought, for her,--and she could eat
when the men came. It is a way women have. Not till it became quite
dark, and she set her kerosene lamp in the window that he might have a
chance to see it when he turned the Locust Grove corner, did Huldah once
feel herself lonely, or permit herself to wish that she did not live in
a place where she could be cut off from all her race. "If John had gone
into partnership with Joe Winter and we had lived in Boston." This was
the thought that crossed her mind. Dear Huldah,--from the end of one
summer to the beginning of the next, Joe Winter does not go home to his
dinner; and what you experience to-day, so far as absence from your
husband goes, is what his wife experiences in Boston ten months, save
Sundays, in every year.

I do not mean that Huldah winced or whined. Not she. Only she did think
"if." Then she sat in front of the stove and watched the coals, and for
a little while continued to think "if." Not long. Very soon she was
engaged in planning how she would arrange the table to-morrow,--whether
Mother Stevens should cut the chicken-pie, or whether she would have
that in front of her own mother. Then she fell to planning what she
would make for Cynthia's baby,--and then to wondering whether Cephas was
in earnest in that half nonsense he wrote about Sibyl Dyer,--and then
the clock struck six!

No bells yet,--no husband,--no anybody. Lantern out and lighted. Rubber
boots on, hood and sack. Shed-shovel in one hand, lantern in the other.
Roadway still bare, but a drift as high as Huldah's shoulders at the
barn door. Lantern on the ground; snow-shovel in both hands now. One,
two, three!--one cubic foot out. One, two, three!--another cubic foot
out. And so on, and so on, and so on, till the doorway is clear again.
Lantern in one hand, snow-shovel in the other, we enter the barn, draw
the water for cows and oxen,--we shake down more hay, and see to the
pigs again. This time we make beds of straw for the horses and the