But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then the out-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking the children in bed, I go out to see that all is well about the barn.
How the night has deepened since my return! No wind stirs. The hill-crest blazes with the light of the stars. Such an earth and sky! I lock the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge to the stump. The bare woods are dark with shadow and deep with the silence of the night. A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then the silence and space reach off through the shadows, infinitely far off down the hillside; and the stars gather in the tops of the trees.
II
THE OPEN FIRE
It is a January night.
". . . . . . . Enclosed
From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,"
we sit with our book before the fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall and glowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads. The children are in bed. She is reading aloud to me:
"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, 'when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there was a middle state'—so she was pleased to ramble on—'in which, I am sure, we were a great deal happier.'"