“Yes.  Out in Wisconsin.  My people were emigrants, and I lived in the woods, there, till I began to paint my way out.  I began pretty early, but I was in the woods till I was sixteen.”

“I didn’t know that,” she repeated.  “I always thought that you were—­”

“Summer folks, like the rest?  No, I’m all-the-year-round folks originally.  But I haven’t been in the country in the winter since I was a boy; and it’s all been coming back to me, here, like some one else’s experience.”

She did not say anything, but the interest in her eyes, which she could not keep from his face now, prompted him to go on.

“You can make a beginning in the West easier than you can in the East, and some people who came to our lumber camp discovered me, and gave me a chance to begin.  I went to Milwaukee first, and they made me think I was somebody.  Then I came on to New York, and they made me think I was nobody.  I had to go to Europe to find out which I was; but after I had been there long enough I didn’t care to know.  What I was trying to do was the important thing to me; not the fellow who was trying to do it.”

“Yes,” she said, with intelligence.

“I met some Boston people in Italy, and I thought I should like to live where that kind of people lived.  That’s the way I came to be in Boston.  It all seems very simple now, but I used to think it might look romantic from the outside.  I’ve had a happy life; and I’m glad it began in the country.  I shouldn’t care if it ended there.  I don’t know why I’ve bothered you with my autobiography, though.  Perhaps because I thought you knew it already.”

She looked as if she would have said something fitting if she could have ruled herself to it; but she said nothing at all.  Her failure seemed to abash her, and she could only ask him if he would not have some more coffee, and then excuse herself, and leave him to finish his breakfast alone.

That day he tried for his picture from several points out-of-doors before he found that his own window gave him the best.  With the window open, and the stove warm at his back, he worked there in great comfort nearly every afternoon.  The snows kept off, and the clear sunsets burned behind the summit day after day.  He painted frankly and faithfully, and made a picture which, he said to himself, no one would believe in, with that warm color tender upon the frozen hills.  The soft suffusion of the winter scene was improbable to him when he had it in, nature before his eyes; when he looked at it as he got it on his canvas it was simply impossible.

In the forenoons he had nothing to do, for he worked at his picture only when the conditions renewed themselves with the sinking sun.  He tried to be in the open air, and get the good of it; but his strength for walking had failed him, and he kept mostly to the paths broken around the house.  He went a good deal to the barn with Whitwell and Jombateeste to look after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and champing gave him a sort of animal pleasure.  The blended odors of the hay-mows and of the creatures’ breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their bodies diffused through the cold obscurity.