The three that entered the house are standing, nervously looking on the scene before them. A fireless stove, unmade beds, everything desolate and untidy. In the middle of the room, a table; on it a motionless form, covered with a coarse gray blanket; on the bed a much smaller, shrouded, form.
One of the women advances to the table, and summoning all her fortitude, throws aside the blanket, and looks on the face of the frozen woman ... frozen solid as a block of ice, the clenched hands, filled with fine, dry snow, fine as sand, sifted into every tress of hair, into her eyes, her ears, down into her bosom, that lay bare, showing how she had tried to nourish her babe, in the face of that pitiless storm ... what availed the warmest mother love, against that relentless cold ... frozen with the blood still in her cheeks and lips ... no time for the crimson stream of life to leave the face.
Bare and comfortless as their home was, no one knows what tempted them to leave it that terrible day. They were bound for a neighbor’s house half a mile distant but had not gone quarter the way when they turned in the wrong direction. They struggled on, husband and wife, carrying the babe less than a year old, until the woman could go no further, and throwing up her hands, fell down. Laying the now stiffening form of the child beside its mother, the bewildered father wandered on, on, until he reached by chance, miles distant, a place to incoherently tell his story and—perish.
The family belonged to the poor “dumb driven cattle” class of Russian Jews. Their own kind had left them to their fate. So the settlers had turned out to give them Christian burial. When the desolate funeral was over the party drove rapidly home again, with the picture before them, of what might be their own fate, if night overtook them on the prairies.
A DEPUTY GOVERNOR’S WOOING
(French of Andre Theuriet: Isabel Smithson: For Short Stories.)
“Can you receive Madame Blouet, sir?” asked an attendant, as he opened the door of the deputy governor’s office.
It was a large, severe-looking apartment, with a very high ceiling, two windows draped with green damask curtains, walls and arm-chairs of the same color, and heavy bookcases of mahogany. The highly waxed floor reflected the cold symmetry of the official furniture, and the mirror over the mantel-piece reproduced with exactness a black marble clock, two bronze lamps and a pair of gilt candlesticks.
Hubert Boinville, the deputy governor, was seated, with his back to the fire-place, at a large mahogany desk which was littered over with deeds and various papers. He raised his grave, melancholy face which was framed in a brown beard, tinged with a few gray hairs, and his black eyes, with tired-looking lids, glanced at the card which the solemn usher handed to him.