At any rate there sat old John Enderby beside the plain deal table, his head bowed upon his hands, his grizzled face with its unshorn stubble stricken down with the lines of devastating trouble.  From time to time he rose and cast a fresh stick of tamarack into the fire with a savage thud that sent a shower of sparks up the chimney.  Across the fireplace sat his wife Anna on a straight-backed chair, looking into the fire with the mute resignation of her sex.

What was wrong with them anyway?  Ah, reader, can you ask?  Do you know or remember so little of the life of the old homestead?  When I have said that it is the Old Homestead and Xmas Eve, and that the farmer is in great trouble and throwing tamarack at the fire, surely you ought to guess!

The Old Homestead was mortgaged!  Ten years ago, reckless with debt, crazed with remorse, mad with despair and persecuted with rheumatism, John Enderby had mortgaged his farmstead for twenty-four dollars and thirty cents.

To-night the mortgage fell due, to-night at midnight, Xmas night.  Such is the way in which mortgages of this kind are always drawn.  Yes, sir, it was drawn with such diabolical skill that on this night of all nights the mortgage would be foreclosed.  At midnight the men would come with hammer and nails and foreclose it, nail it up tight.

So the afflicted couple sat.

Anna, with the patient resignation of her sex, sat silent or at times endeavoured to read.  She had taken down from the little wall-shelf Bunyan’s Holy Living and Holy Dying.  She tried to read it.  She could not.  Then she had taken Dante’s Inferno.  She could not read it.  Then she had selected Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  But she could not read it either.  Lastly, she had taken the Farmer’s Almanac for 1911.  The books lay littered about her as she sat in patient despair.

John Enderby showed all the passion of an uncontrolled nature.  At times he would reach out for the crock of buttermilk that stood beside him and drained a draught of the maddening liquid, till his brain glowed like the coals of the tamarack fire before him.

“John,” pleaded Anna, “leave alone the buttermilk.  It only maddens you.  No good ever came of that.”

“Aye, lass,” said the farmer, with a bitter laugh, as he buried his head again in the crock, “what care I if it maddens me.”

“Ah, John, you’d better be employed in reading the Good Book than in your wild courses.  Here take it, father, and read it”—­and she handed to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf.  Enderby paused a moment and held the volume in his hand.  He and his wife had known nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received had stood him in good stead.

“Take the book,” she said.  “Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it brings comfort.”