So it happened that the very day after Lloyd’s had shut down, when every man out of employment felt poorer than he did later when he had grown accustomed to the sensation of no money coming in, Andrew Brewster hired a horse and double sleigh, and took Ellen, her mother, grandmother, and aunt out sleigh-riding.  Ellen sat on the back seat of the sleigh, full of that radiant happiness felt by a child whose pleasures have not been repeated often enough for satiety.  The sleigh slid over the blue levels of snow followed by long creaks like wakes of sound, when the livery-stable horse shook his head proudly and set his bells in a flurry.  Ellen drew a long breath of rapture.  These unaccustomed sounds held harmonies of happiness which would echo through her future, for no one can estimate the immortality of some little delight of a child.  In all her life, Ellen never forgot that sleigh-ride.  It was a very cold day, and the virgin snow did not melt at all; the wind blew a soft, steady pressure from the west, and its wings were evident from the glistening crystals which were lifted and borne along.  The trees held their shining boughs against the blue of the sky, and burned and blazed here and there as with lamps of diamonds.  The child looked at them, and they lit her soul.  Her little face, between the swan’s-down puffs of her hood, deepened in color like a rose; her blue eyes shone; she laughed and dimpled silently; she was in too much bliss to speak.  The others kept looking at her, then at one another.  Fanny nudged her mother-in-law, behind the child’s back, and the two women exchanged glances of confidential pride.  Andrew and Eva kept glancing around at her, and asking if she were having a good time.  Eva was smartly dressed in her best hat, gay with bows and red wings bristling as sharply as the head-dress of an Indian chief in the old pictures.  She had a red coat, and a long fur boa wound around her throat; the clear crimson of her cheeks, her great black eyes, and her heavy black braids were so striking that people whom they met looked long at her.  Eva talked fast to Andrew, and laughed often and loudly.

Whenever that strident laugh of hers rang out, Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, on the seat behind, moved her be-shawled shoulders with a shivering hunch of disgust.  “Can’t you tell that girl not to laugh so loud when we’re out ridin’,” she said to her son that evening; “I saw folks lookin’.”

“Oh, never mind, mother,” Andrew said; “the poor girl’s got a good deal on her mind.”

“I suppose you mean that Tinny feller,” said Mrs. Zelotes, alluding to something which had happened that afternoon in the course of the sleigh-ride.

The sleighing that day was excellent, for there had been an ice coating on the road before, and the last not very heavy snowfall had been just enough.  The Brewsters passed and met many others:  young men out with their sweethearts, whole families drawn by the sober old horse as old as the grown-up children; rakish young men driving stable teams, leaning forward with long circles of whip over the horses’ backs, leaving the scent of cigars behind them; and often, too, two young ladies in dainty turnouts; and sometimes two girls or four girls from Lloyd’s, who had clubbed together and hired a sleigh, taking reckless advantage of their enforced vacation.