One bright morning in early February Ellen fastened the small children into the kitchen, tying the latch with a string. Then she bore her child alone, being finally delivered toward the noon of the day. When Jasper came he broke the string with a blow on the door and went in where she lay, the child beside her rolled in a piece of an old blanket. The child was a thin wizened creature, the skin pulled gauntly over its bony face. With its long protruding skull and its wrinkled brow it looked like a dwarfed image of an old man, as Jasper would look if he lived to be a hundred years old. When it began to cry a strange wail, the thin cry of the newborn seemed to be coming from Jasper as an old withered man, and Ellen covered the child with her arms and hid it in her bosom. It was March before they moved away although Phillips told Jasper he need not hurry, he might take his time about finding a place for his family to live, but Jasper said that he had as well go now as later. He would work that year on Robinson’s farm and the house there was vacant; he would go as soon as the winter broke. The infant was soon very much endeared to the other children, who began to call him Chick as they played about him, and after a little that name was established and the child seemed much too precious to be encumbered with any name less light. ‘After a while I will name him, Thomas maybe, or Albert,’ Ellen said, or she would say that Jasper might choose the name. ‘Thomas Albert,’ Jasper said, ‘after while, when he’s bigger we’ll call him Tom or Al.’ Then he had Job Tucker make a new cradle, stinting nothing in the wood or the work, and Job took seasoned cherry boards which he had saved for some fine task and rubbed the finished pieces with oil until they shone darkly red, the finest cradle he had ever made, he said. Chick was so little and thin that one scarcely knew that one held him in arms. He gained a few pounds in weight as the months passed but he kept his look of great age, his bulging forehead and his long unfleshed jaws.

At Robinson’s place the house stood close beside the road, but a few feet back from the fenceline. Wagons rumbling along the way would wake the infant from his sleep. Ellen mended the rude coops and cleared them of vermin and set her hens on fresh straw which Jasper brought. The money she had saved for the machine went, a little here and a little there, and it was gone, blankets for Chick, medicine and infant foods. The child often fell into paroxysms or lay half asleep. Ellen and Jasper went softly about the house, or they spoke softly to each other from room to room. At the end of the year they went to McKnight’s farm, three miles further on the road. It mattered much less to her now what country she lived in, here or there, or whether there was a tree in the yard or a spring or a well for water, a stove for heat or a fireplace. A year on Robinson’s place, a year on McKnight’s, it was all one, or if there was a hoe to dig the garden or a mattock, a fork or a spade. If there were vermin in the hen coops her labour was doubled; it was all one. Hen and Nannie and Joe would read their small books by the fire after supper or they would rouse little Chick to play with them, but the light in his eyes was faint. Ellen set her strength to work all the harder because of Chick, planting more because of him, and when he lay wanly uncommitted to life she would work over the bean rows with the mattock. She must work in the garden and so her work there became a fervour of service to the child.