keen
wind swept down the mountain and played hide-and-seek with the cabin
door, so that in the morning a long bar of high-piled snow lay across
the cabin floor.

When the men from the village had ploughed their way through the snow
and pushed open the door, they stopped amazed upon the threshold,
looking at one another with mingled alarm and pity; then one of them,
conquering his reluctance, strode forward. He stooped for a moment
over the prostrate form of the man before he turned and faced his
companions.

"Boys, he's--gone," he said huskily; and in the silence that followed,
four men bared their heads.

It was a dog's low whine that first stirred into action the man by the
bunk. He looked down and his eyes grew luminous. He saw the fireless
hearth, the drifted snow, and the half-dead dog keeping watchful guard
over a pile of inert fur and feathers on the floor--a pile frozen stiff
and mutely witnessing to a daily duty well performed.

"I reckon I'm needin' a dog," he said, as he stooped and patted Stub's
head.

A Matter of System

At the office of Hawkins & Hawkins, system was everything. Even the
trotter-boy was reduced to an orbit that ignored craps and marbles, and
the stenographer went about her work like a well-oiled bit of
machinery. It is not strange, then, that Jasper Hawkins, senior member
of the firm, was particularly incensed at the confusion that Christmas
always brought to his home.

For years he bore--with such patience as he could muster--the attack of
nervous prostration that regularly, on the 26th day of December, laid
his wife upon a bed of invalidism; then, in the face of the
unmistakable evidence that the malady would this year precede the holy
day of peace and good-will, he burst his bonds of self-control and
spoke his mind.

It was upon the morning of the 21st.

"Edith," he began, in what his young daughter called his "now mind"
voice, "this thing has got to stop."

"What thing?"

"Christmas."

"_Jas_-per!"--it was as if she thought he had the power to sweep
good-will itself from the earth. "Christmas--_stop_!"

"Yes. My dear, how did you spend yesterday?"

"I was--shopping."

"Exactly. And the day before?--and the day before that?--and before
that? You need n't answer, for I know. And you were shopping for--"
he paused expectantly.

"Presents." Something quite outside of herself had forced the answer.

"Exactly. Now, Edith, surely it need not take all