Jombatiste read on—­the story of a decent, ambitious man, employed in a sweatshop tailoring establishment, who contracted tuberculosis from the foul air, and who dragged down with him, in his agonizing descent to the very depths of misery, a wife and two children.  He was now dead, and his wife was living in a corner of a moldy, damp basement, a pile of rags the only bed for her and her children, their only heat what fire the mother could make out of paper and rubbish picked up on the streets.

Cousin Tryphena’s horrified eyes fell on her well-blacked stove, sending out the aromatic breath of burning white-birch sticks.  She recoiled from it with a shudder.

Jombatiste read on, the story of the woman who, when her three sons died in an accident due to negligence on their employer’s part ... he read no more that day, for Cousin Tryphena put her gray head down on the center-table and wept as she never had done in her life.  Jombatiste rose softly and tiptoed out of the room.

The tap-tap-tap of his hammer rang loud and fast the rest of that day.  He was exulting over having aroused another bourgeois from the sleep of greasy complacency.  He had made a convert.  To his dire and utter pennilessness, Cousin Tryphena’s tiny income seemed a fortune.  He had a happy dream of persuading her to join him in his weekly contributions to the sacred funds!  As he stood at midnight, in the open door, for the long draught of fresh air he always took before turning in on his pile of hay, he heard in the wood on the hill back of the house the shrill shriek of a trapped rabbit.  He plowed furiously out through the deep snow to find it, gave the tortured animal a merciful death, carried the trap back to the river and threw it in with a furious splash.  He strode home under the frosty stars, his dirty shirt open over his corded, old neck, his burning heart almost content.  He had done a good day’s work.

Early the next morning, his neighbor came to his door, very white, very hollow-eyed, evidently with a sleepless night back of her, and asked him for the papers he had read from.  Jombatiste gave them to her in a tactful silence.  She took them in one shaking hand, drawing her shawl around her wrinkled face with the other, and went back through the snow to her own house.

By noon that day, everyone in the village was thrilling with wild surmise.  Cousin Tryphena had gone over to Graham and Sanders’, asked to use their long-distance telephone and had telephoned to Putnam to come and get her sideboard.  After this strange act, she had passed Albert Graham, then by chance alone in the store, with so wild a mien that he had not ventured to make any inquiries.  But he took pains to mention the matter, to everyone who happened to come in, that morning; and, by dinner-time, every family in Hillsboro was discussing over its pie the possibility that the well-known queer streak, which had sent several of Cousin Tryphena’s ancestors to the asylum, was suddenly making its appearance in her.