The next winter the snows were uncommonly heavy.  They began before Thanksgiving and came in thick storms.  There were great drifts in all the door-yards, the stone walls and fences were hidden, the trees stood in deep, swirling hollows of snow.  Now and then a shed-roof broke under the frozen weight; one walked through the village street as through clear-cut furrows of snow, all the shadows were blue, there was a dazzle of glacier light over the whole village when the sun arose.  However, it was a fine winter for Jerome, as far as his work was concerned.  Wood is drawn easily on sleds, and the snow air nerves one for sharp labors.  Jerome calculated that by May he should be not only doing a prosperous business, but should have a snug little sum clear.  Then he would delay no longer.

On the nineteenth day of March came the last snow-storm, and the worst of the season.  Martin Cheeseman went home early.  Jerome did not stay in the mill long after he left.  The darkness was settling down fast, and he could do little by himself.

Moreover, an intense eagerness to be at home seized him.  He began to imagine that something had happened to his mother or Elmira, and imagination of evil was so foreign to him that it had almost the force of conviction.

He fell also to thinking of his father, inconsequently, as it seemed, yet it was not so, for imagined disasters lead back by retrograde of sequence to memories of real ones.

He lived over again his frenzied search for his father, his discovery of the hat on the shore of the deep pond.  “Poor father!” he muttered.

All the way home this living anxiety for his mother and sister, and this dead sorrow haunted him.  He thought as he struggled through the snow, his face bent before the drive of the sleet as before a flail of ice, how often in all weathers his father had traversed this same road, how his own feet could scarcely step out of his old tracks.  He thought how many a night, through such a storm as this, his father had toiled wearily home, and with no such fire of youth and hope in his heart to cheer him on.  “Father must have given up a long time before he died,” he said to himself.

The imagination of his father plodding homeward in his old harness of hopeless toil grew so strong that his own identity paled.  He seemed to lose all ambition and zeal, a kind of heredity of discouragement overspread him.  “I don’t know but I’ll have to give up, finally, the way he did,” he muttered, panting under the buffeting of the snow wind.

He met no one on his way home.  Once a loaded wood-sled came up behind him with a faint creak and jingle of harness, then the straining flanks of the horse, the cubic pile of wood shaded out of shape by the snow, the humped back of the driver on the top, passed out of sight, as behind a slanting white curtain.  The village houses receded through shifting distances of pale gloom; one could scarcely distinguish the white slants of their roofs, and the lamp-lights which shone out newly in some of the windows made rosy nimbuses.