“Nor a coat to your back!” broke in the woman.

Then they both laughed again, loudly and heartily.

Fred remembered now what they were laughing at.  The man was a minister, well known in Boston, and the woman was his wife.  He had just come in, running through the storm, and almost out of breath.

“Wife! my coat!  Don’t you see I am in my shirt-sleeves?  I’ve got a snow-bank on my back!”

“Why! where in the world—­what have you done with your coat?”

“Oh! that I am almost ashamed to tell you; it seems such a parading sort o’ thing to do in the streets!  But you may depend, I didn’t stand at the corners long, to be seen of men, in this driving storm!  Fact was, wife, I just took it off of my back, and gave it to poor old M’Carty;—­he’d nothing on but rags, and was fairly shaking with the cold.  I knew I’d another to home,—­and what does a man want of two coats?  One’s enough for anybody.  Besides, didn’t our Lord particularly tell his disciples not to have but one?  Say, now, wife!”

The wife looked blank and embarrassed.

“Well, wife! what now?”

“Only”——­and she paused again.

“Only what?  Out with it!  You think it was silly!  But, wife, you’d ‘a’ done the same thing;—­you couldn’t ‘a’ helped it, nohow.  Providence seemed to ‘a’ cast him in my way o’ purpose.  I tell you, wife, it was as plain-spoken as it could be,—­’Be ye warmed!’ Why, you’d ‘a’ done the same thing, wife!”

“My goodness!  I have done it, husband!  A man and his wife and three little children came along, not half an hour ago, looking so miserable and cold, that, as I thought, as you say, you had one coat, and that was all you really needed, I just out with the other, and put it on the man’s back.  The thankfullest creature you ever saw!”

And here the man had broken into the hearty laugh Fred heard.

When the man put on his dressing-gown, which was comfortable for the fireside, the wife renewed her question.  He answered with a bright smile,—­

“The Son of Man, my dear we know, had not where to lay his head; but then he always trusted in God.  God never fails his children.  Thanks to Him!” added he, reverently, and raising loving eyes to heaven, as if he really spoke to somebody there,—­“Thanks to Him! there’s bountiful hands and tender hearts, a plenty of ’em, in the city of Boston.  I’ve only got to strike, and the waters ’ll flow out! yes,—­rivers of water!”

The wife looked down, and said, meditatively, “It makes me think what our dear Saviour said to poor Peter,—­’O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?’”

The man answered in a clear, joyful tone, “Oh, you won’t doubt more’n half a minute to time, wife!—­and I won’t doubt at all!”

With that, the two aged Christians struck up a sweet Wesleyan melody; and that, too, was in the same soft minor key that Fred had heard singing through the gas-burner.  They finished the little hymn, and the woman scraped some corn from a cob into the corn-popper.  In a few minutes, she had filled a large bowl with the parched corn.