“There’s no danger of thaw before morning, Jem?”—­looking anxiously up into the night, as they rested the bucket on the curb.

“Thaw! there’s a woman’s notion for you!  Why, the very crow is frozen out of the cocks yonder!”—­stretching his arms, and clapping his hollow cheat, as if he were six feet high.  “No, we’ll not have a thaw, little woman.”

The children often called her that, in a fond, protecting way; but it sounded most oddly from Jem, he was such a weak, swaggering sparrow of a little chap.  He stretched his hands as high as he could reach up to her hips, 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