Through snow-storms Barney plunged forth to the swamp, and worked all day in the thick white slant of the storm, with the snow heaping itself upon his bowed shoulders.

People prophesied that he would kill himself; but he kept on day after day, and had not even a cold until February.  Then there came a south rain and a thaw, and Barney went to the swamp and worked two days knee-deep in melting snow.  Then there was a morning when he awoke as if on a bed of sharp knives, and lay alone all day and all that night, and all the next day and that night, not being able to stir without making the knives cut into his vitals.

Barney lay there all that time, and his soul became fairly bound into passiveness with awful fetters of fiery bone and muscle; sometimes he groaned, but nobody heard him.  The last night he felt as if his whole physical nature was knitting about him and stifling him with awful coils of pain.  The tears rolled over his cheeks.  He prayed with hoarse gasps, and he could not tell if anybody heard him.  A dim light from a window in the Barnard house on the hill lay into the kitchen opposite his bedroom door.  He thought of Charlotte, as if he had been a child and she his mother.  The maternal and protecting element in her love was all that appealed to him then, and all that he missed or wanted.  “Charlotte, Charlotte,” he mumbled to himself with his parched, quivering lips.

At noon the next day Cephas Barnard came home from the store; he had been down to buy some molasses.  When he entered his kitchen he set the jug down on the table with a hard clap, then stood still in his wet boots.

Sarah and Charlotte were getting dinner, both standing over the stove.  Sarah glanced at Cephas furtively, then at Charlotte; Cephas never stirred.  A pool of water collected around his boots, his brows bent moodily under his cap.

“Why don’t you set down, Cephas, an’ take off your boots?” Sarah ventured at length, timidly.

“Folks are fools,” grunted Cephas.

“I dunno what you mean, Cephas.”

Cephas got the boot-jack out of the corner, sat down, and began jerking off the wet boots with sympathetic screws of his face.

Sarah stood with a wooden spoon uplifted, eying him anxiously.  Charlotte went into the pantry.

“There ‘ain’t anythin’ happened, has there, Cephas?” said Sarah, presently.

Cephas pulled off the second boot, and sat holding his blue yarn stocking-feet well up from the wet floor.  “There ain’t no need of havin’ the rheumatiz, accordin’ to my way of thinkin’,” said he.

“Who’s got the rheumatiz, Cephas?”

“If folks lived right they wouldn’t have it.”

“You ’ain’t got it, have you, Cephas?”

“I ‘ain’t never had a tech of it in my life except once, an’ then ‘twas due to my not drinkin’ enough.”

“Not drinkin’ enough?”

“Yes, I didn’t drink enough water.  Folks with rheumatiz had ought to drink all the water they can swaller.  They had ought to drink more’n they eat.”