by the weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays,
and knew that the solitary roof showing through bare branches near
the bottom of the hill was that of Frome's saw-mill. It looked
exanimate enough, with its idle wheel looming above the black stream
dashed with yellow-white spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging
under their white load. Frome did not even turn his head as we drove
by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a
mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard
of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings
of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out
their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their
boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against
the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New
England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.

"That's my place," said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame
elbow; and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not
know what to answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery
sunlight exposed the house on the slope above us in all its
plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped
from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of
paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing
of the snow.

"The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the
'L,' a while back," Frome continued, checking with a twitch of the
left rein the bay's evident intention of turning in through the
broken-down gate.

I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house