The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock
in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner,
were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were
all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a
few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long
caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their
wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out
of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along
the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons,
shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was
quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.

On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede
boy, crying bitterly. He was about five years old. His black cloth
coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old
man. His shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times
and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt
and the tops of his clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled
down over his ears; his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and
red with cold. He cried quietly, and the few people who hurried
by did not notice him. He was afraid to stop any one, afraid to
go into the store and ask for help, so he sat wringing his long
sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him, whimpering, "My
kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!" At the top of the pole
crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly and clinging
desperately to the wood with her claws. The boy had been left
at the store while his sister went to the doctor's office, and in
her absence a dog had chased his kitten up the pole. The little
creature had never been so high before, and she was too frightened
to move. Her master was sunk in despair. He was a little country