In that part of the country where I was born and grew up, the folks say that wherever the dead lie, there round about them, whether the time be summer or winter, the air grows cold and colder, and that no fire, though you pile the logs half-way up the chimney, will ever make it warm.

A few months' hospital training generally cures one of all fanciful notions about death, but this idea I have never been able to get rid of.

My thermometer may show me sixty, and I may try to believe that the temperature _is_ sixty, but if the dead are beside me I feel cold to the marrow of my bones.

I could _see_ the chill from the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up about his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart.
"Jeanie and I redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if Death were waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out.

I hardly ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers to his anxious questions.
"At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and, shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh till we reeled against the dirty walls.