He got very little out of the perverse instrument.  “I can’t seem to work her.  If Jackson was here—­”

“We shouldn’t need to ask planchette about him,” Cynthia once suggested, with the spare sense of humor that sometimes revealed itself in her.

“Well, I guess that’s something so,” her father candidly admitted.  But the next time he consulted the helpless planchette as hopefully as before.  “You can’t tell, you can’t tell,” he urged.

“The trouble seems to be that planchette can’t tell,” said Mrs. Durgin, and they all laughed.  They were not people who laughed a great deal, and they were each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from pleasure in the present.  The little Canuck was the only one who suffered himself a contemporaneous consolation.  His early faith had so far lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he found the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and looked forward to nothing better.  To be well fed, well housed, and well heated; to smoke successive pipes while the others talked, and to catch through his smoke-wreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was enough.  He felt that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson’s absence he occupied a dignified and responsible position, with a confidential relation to the exile which justified him in sending special messages to him, and attaching peculiar value to Jackson’s remembrances.

The exile’s letters said very little about his health, which in the sense of no news his mother held to be good news, but they were full concerning the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.

They were largely rescripts of each day’s observations and experiences, close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for Whitwell.  The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was apt to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other defenceless moments.  He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and answered from the hay-loft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle to Whitwell, volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he believed, him, everybody got a hastral body, English same as Mormons.

“Guess you mean Moslems,” said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the difference, defiantly.

The letters which came to Cynthia could not be made as much a general interest, and, in fact, no one else cared so much for them as for Jackson’s letters, not even Jeff’s mother.  After Cynthia got one of them, she would ask, perfunctorily, what Jeff said, but when she was told there was no news she did not press her question.