, and smoothed her linsey dress down: if it had been her face, the
touch could not have been more tender.

"You don't think of the luck we always have. Why, it couldn't rain on
Christmas for you or me, mother!"

She laughed, nodding several times.

"Well, that is sure, Jem," stopping to look into the lean, emphatic
little face, and to pass her hand over the tow-colored hair.

Somehow, the bond between mother and son was curiously strong to-night.
It was always so on Christmas. At other times they were much like two
children in companionship, but Christmas never came without bringing a
vague sense of cowering close together as though some danger stood near
them. There was something half fierce, now, in the way she caressed his
face.

"Come on with the bucket, brother," she said, cheerfully, stamping the
clogging snow from her shoes, shading her eyes with her hand, and
looking over the white stretch to the black line of hills chopping the
east. "More like a hail-gust than rain. But I was afraid of that, you
see," as they went up the path. "There's an old saying, that trouble
always comes with rain. And it did in my life--to me"--

She was talking to herself. Jem whistled, pretending not to hear; but he
peered sharply into her face, with the relish which all sickly,
premature children have for a mystery or pain. Very seldom was there
hint of either about Martha Yarrow. She was an Ohio woman, small-boned,
muscular, with healthy, quick blood, not a scrofulous, ill-tempered drop
in her veins; in her brain only a very few and obstinate opinions,
maybe, but all of them lying open to the sight of anybody who cared to
know them. Not long ago, she had been a pretty, bouncing country-belle;
now, she was a hard-working housewife: a Whig, because all the Clarks
(her own family) were Whigs: going to the Baptist church, with no clear
ideas about close communion or immersion, because she had married a
country-parson. With a consciousness that she had borne a heavier pain
in her life than most women, and ought to feel scourged and sad, she did
cry out with such feeling sometimes,--but with a keen, natural relish
for apple-butter parings, or fair-days, or a neighbor dropping in to
tea, or anything that would give the children and herself a chance to
joke and laugh, and be like other people again. Between the two
feelings, her temper was odd and uncertain enough. But in this December
air, now, her still rounded cheek grew red, her br