of all nights the mortgage would be foreclosed. At midnight the men
would come with hammer and nails and foreclose it, nail it up tight.

So the afflicted couple sat.

Anna, with the patient resignation of her sex, sat silent or at times
endeavoured to read. She had taken down from the little wall-shelf
Bunyan's _Holy Living and Holy Dying_. She tried to read it. She
could not. Then she had taken Dante's _Inferno_. She could not read
it. Then she had selected Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_. But she
could not read it either. Lastly, she had taken the Farmer's Almanac
for 1911. The books lay littered about her as she sat in patient despair.

John Enderby showed all the passion of an uncontrolled nature. At times
he would reach out for the crock of buttermilk that stood beside him and
drained a draught of the maddening liquid, till his brain glowed like
the coals of the tamarack fire before him.

"John," pleaded Anna, "leave alone the buttermilk. It only maddens you.
No good ever came of that."

"Aye, lass," said the farmer, with a bitter laugh, as he buried his head
again in the crock, "what care I if it maddens me."

"Ah, John, you'd better be employed in reading the Good Book than in
your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it"--and she handed
to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a
moment and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known
nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but
the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received