At last Holcroft partially shook off his stupor, and began the experiment of
keeping house and maintaining his dairy with hired help. For a long year he
had struggled on through all kinds of domestic vicissitude, conscious all the
time that things were going from bad to worse. His house was isolated, the
region sparsely settled, and good help difficult to be obtained under favoring
auspices. The few respectable women in the neighborhood who occasionally
"lent a hand" in other homes than their own would not compromise themselves,
as they expressed it, by "keepin' house for a widower." Servants obtained
from the neighboring town either could not endure the loneliness, or else were
so wasteful and ignorant that the farmer, in sheer desperation, discharged
them. The silent, grief-stricken, rugged-featured man was no company for
anyone. The year was but a record of changes, waste, and small pilferings.
Although he knew he could not afford it, he tried the device of obtaining two
women instead of one, so that they might have society in each other; but
either they would not stay or else he found that he had two thieves to deal
with instead of one--brazen, incompetent creatures who knew more about whisky
than milk, and who made his home a terror to him.

Some asked good-naturedly, "Why don't you marry again?" Not only was the very
thought repugnant, but he knew well that he was not the man to thrive on any
such errand to the neighboring farmhouses. Though apparently he had little
sentiment in his nature, yet the memory of his wife was like his religion. He
felt that he could not put an ordinary woman into his wife's place, and say to
her the words he had spoken before. Such a marriage would be to him a
grotesque farce, at which his soul revolted.

At last he was driven to the necessity of applying for help to an Irish family
that had recently moved into the neighborhood. The promise was forbidding,
indeed, as he entered the squalid abode in which were huddled men, women, and
children. A sister of the mistress of the shanty was voluble in her