"Go an' bring me in some kindlin' wood," said Deborah.

Ephraim stood by, staring alternately at his father and mother. He had watched the funeral procession pass with furtive interest.

"It won't hurt you none to make a few lamp-lighters," said his mother. "You set right down here, an' I'll get you some paper."

Ephraim clapped his hand to his side, and rolled his eyes agonizingly towards his mother, but she took no notice. She got some paper out of the cupboard, and Ephraim sat down and began quirling it into long spirals with a wretched sulky air.

Since his sister's marriage Ephraim had had a sterner experience than had ever fallen to his lot before. His mother redoubled her discipline over him. It was as if she had resolved, since all her vigorous training had failed in the case of his sister, that she would intensify it to such purpose that it should not fail with him.

So strait and narrow was the path in which Ephraim was forced to tread those wintry days, so bound and fettered was he by precept and admonition, that it seemed as if his very soul could do no more than shuffle along where his mother pointed.

A scanty and simple diet had Ephraim, and it seemed to him not so much from a solicitude for his health as from a desire to mortify his flesh for the good of his spirit. Ephraim obeyed perforce; he was sincerely afraid of his mother, but he had within him a dogged and growing resentment against those attempts to improve his spirit.

Not a bit of cake was he allowed to taste. When the door of a certain closet in which pound-cake for possible guests was always kept in a jar, and had been ever since Ephraim could remember, was opened, the boy's eyes would fairly glare with desire. "Jest gimme a little scrap, mother," he would whine. He had formerly, on rare occasions, been allowed a small modicum of cake, but now his mother was unyielding. He got not a crumb; he could only sniff hungrily at the rich, spicy, and fruity aroma which came forth from the closet, and swallow at it vainly and unsatisfactorily with straining palate.

Ephraim was not allowed a soft-stoned plum from a piece of mince-pie; the pie had always been tabooed. He was not even allowed to pick over the plums for the pies, unless under the steady watch of his mother's eyes. Once she seemed to see him approach a plum to his mouth when her back was towards him.

"What are you doing, Ephraim?" she said, and her voice sounded to the boy like one from the Old Testament. He put the plum promptly into the bowl instead of his mouth.

"I ain't doin' nothin', mother," said he; but his eyes rolled alarmedly after his mother as she went across the kitchen. That frightened Ephraim. He was a practical boy and not easily imposed upon, but it really seemed to him that his mother had seen him, after some occult and uncanny fashion, from the back of her head. A vague and preposterous fancy actually passed through his bewildered boyish brain that the little, tightly twisted knob of hair on the back of a feminine head might have some strange visual power of its own.

He never dared taste another plum, even if the knob of hair directly faced him.

Every day Ephraim had a double task to learn in his catechism, for Deborah held that no labor, however arduous, which savored of the Word and the Spirit could work him bodily ill. If Ephraim had been enterprising and daring enough, he would have fairly cursed the Westminster divines, as he sat hour after hour, crooking his boyish back painfully over their consolidated wisdom, driving the letter of their dogmas into his boyish brain, while the sense of them utterly escaped him.

There was one whole day during which Ephraim toiled, laboriously conning over the majestic sentences in loud whispers, and received thereby only a vague impression and maudlin hope that he himself might be one of the elect of which they treated, because he was so strenuously deprived of plums in this life, and might therefore reasonably expect his share of them in the life to come.

That day poor Ephraim--glancing between whiles at some boys out coasting over in a field, down a fine icy slope, hearing now and then their shouts of glee--had a certain sense of superiority and complacency along with the piteous and wistful longing which always abode in his heart.

"Maybe," thought Ephraim, half unconsciously, not framing the thought in words to his mind--"maybe if I am a good boy, and don't have any plums, nor go out coasting like them, I shall go to heaven, and maybe they won't." Ephraim's poor purple face at the window-pane took on a strange, serious expression as he evolved his childish tenet of theology. His mother came in from another room. "Have you got that learned?" said she, and Ephraim bent over his task again.

Ephraim had not been quite as well as usual this winter, and his mother had been more than usually anxious about him. She called the doctor in finally, and followed him out into the cold entry when he left. "He's worse than he has been, ain't he?" she said, abruptly.

The doctor hesitated. He was an old man with a moderate manner. He buttoned his old great-coat, redolent of drugs, closer, his breath steamed out in the frosty entry. "I guess you had better be a little careful about getting him excited," he said at last, evasively. "You had better get along as easy as you can with him." The doctor's manner implied more than his words; he had his own opinion of Deborah Thayer's sternness of rule, and he had sympathy with Rebecca.

Deborah seemed to have an intuition of it, for she looked at him, and raised her voice after a manner which would have become the Deborah of the scriptures.

"What would you have me do?" she demanded. "Would you have me let him have his own way if it were for the injury of his soul?" It was curious that Deborah, as she spoke, seemed to look only at the spiritual side of the matter. The idea that her discipline was actually necessary for her son's bodily weal did not occur to her, and she did not urge it as an argument.

"I guess you had better be a little careful and get along as easy as you can," repeated the doctor, opening the door.

"That ain't all that's to be thought of," said Deborah, with stern and tragic emphasis, as the doctor went out.

"What did the doctor say, mother?" Ephraim inquired, when she went into the room again. He looked half scared, half important, as he sat in the great rocking-chair by the fire. He breathed short, and his words were disconnected as he spoke.

His mother, for answer, took the catechism from the shelf, and extended it towards him with a decisive thrust of her arm.

"It is time you studied some more," said she.

Ephraim jerked himself away from the proffered book. "I don't want to study any more now, mother," he whined.

"Take it," said Deborah.

Caleb was paring apples for pies on the other side of the hearth.

Ephraim looked across at him desperately. "I want to play holly-gull with father," he said.

"Ephraim!"

"Can't I play holly-gull with father jest a little while?"

"You take this book and study your lesson," said Deborah, between nearly closed lips.

Ephraim began to weep; he took the book with a vicious snatch and an angry sob. "Won't never let me do anythin' I want to," he cried, convulsively.

"Not another word," said Deborah. Ephraim bent over his catechism with half-suppressed sobs. He dared not weep aloud. Deborah went into the pantry with the medicine-bottle which the doctor had left; she wanted a spoon. Caleb caught hold of her dress as she was passing him.

"What is it?" said she.

"Look here, jest a minute, mother."

"I can't stop, father; Ephraim has got to have his medicine."

"Jest look here a minute, mother."

Deborah bent her head impatiently, and Caleb whispered. "No, he can't; I told him he couldn't," she said aloud, and passed on into the pantry.

Caleb looked over at Ephraim with piteous and helpless sympathy.

"Never you mind, sonny," he said, cautiously.

"She--makes--" began Ephraim with a responsive plaint; but his mother came out of the pantry, and he stopped short. Caleb dropped a pared apple noisily into the pan.

"You'll dent that pan, father, if you fling the apples in that way,"

said Deborah. She had a thick silver spoon, and she measured out a dose of the medicine for Ephraim. She approached him, extending the spoon carefully. "Open your mouth," commanded she.

"Oh, mother, I don't want to take it!"

"Open your mouth!"

"Oh, mother--I don't--want to--ta-ke it!"

"Now, sonny, I wouldn't mind takin' of it. It's real good medicine that the doctor left you, an' father's payin' consid'able for it. The doctor thinks it's goin' to make you well," said Caleb, who was looking on anxiously.

"Open your mouth and _take_ it!" said Deborah, sternly. She presented the spoon at Ephraim as if it were a bayonet and there were death at the point.

"Oh, mother," whimpered Ephraim.

"Mebbe mother will let you have a little taste of lasses arter it, if you take it real good," ventured Caleb.