Winter Fun. Stoddard William Osborn
nor was there any gas, nor hot and cold water; and the furniture was only just as much as was really needed. He had never before slept in a feather-bed; but he was not at all sorry to burrow into one that night, out of the pitilessly frosty air of that chamber.
"How a fellow does go down!" he said to himself; "and it fits all around him. I'll be warm in a minute." And so he was, and with the warmth came the soundest kind of slumber. The Farnhams had kept any number of geese, year after year, in earlier days, and all their feather-beds were uncommonly deep and liberal.
Susie had Pen for a chum, and that was a good reason why neither of them fell asleep right away. It is always a wonder how much talking there is to be done. It is a good thing, too, that so many enterprising people, old and young, are always ready to take up the task of talking it, even if they have to lie awake for a while.
Silence came at last, creeping from room to room; and there is hardly anywhere else such perfect silence to be obtained as can be had in and about a farmhouse away up country, in the dead of winter and the dead of night. It is so still that you can almost hear the starlight crackle on the snow, if there is no wind blowing.
Winter mornings do not anywhere get up as early as men and women are compelled to, but it is more completely so on a farm than in the city. The chamber Porter Hudson slept in was as dark as a pocket when he heard the clang of Penelope's first bell that next morning after his arrival. He sprang out of bed at once, and found his candle, and lighted it to dress by. One glance through the frosty windows told him how little was to be seen at that time of the year and of the day.
In another instant all his thoughts went down stairs ahead of him, and centred themselves upon the great fireplace in the sitting-room. He dressed himself with remarkable quickness, and followed them. He thought that he had never in his life seen a finer-looking fire, the moment he was able to spread his hands in front of it.
Mrs. Farnham was there too, setting the breakfast-table, and smiling on him; and Porter's next idea was, that his aunt was the rosiest, pleasantest, and most comfortable of women.
"It would take a good deal of cold weather to freeze her," he said to himself; and he was right.
He could hear aunt Judith out in the kitchen, complaining to Susie and Pen that every thing in the milk-room had frozen. When Corry and his father came in from feeding the stock, however, they both declared that it was a "splendid, frosty, nipping kind of a morning." They looked as if it might be, and Porter hitched his chair a little nearer the fire; but Corry added, —
"Now, Port, we're in for some fun."
"All right. What is it?"
"We're going to the woods after breakfast. You and I'll take our guns with us, and see if we can't knock over some rabbits."
"Shoot some rabbits!"
"I'll take father's gun, and you can take mine."
Just then Pen's voice sounded from the kitchen excitedly, —
"Do you hear that, Susie? They're going to the woods. Let's go!"
"Oh! if they'll let us."
"Course they will."
"Pen! Penelope Farnham! Look out for those cakes."
"I'm turning 'em, aunt Judith. I'm doing 'em splendidly. – Susie, some of your sausages are a'most done. Let me take 'em out for you."
"No, Pen: I want to cook them all myself. You 'tend to your cakes."
Buckwheat-cakes and home-made sausages, – what a breakfast that was for a frosty morning!
Susie Hudson was puzzled to say which she enjoyed most, – the cooking or the eating; and she certainly did her share of both very well for a young lady of sixteen from the great city.
"Port, can you shoot?" asked Corry a little suddenly at table.
"Shoot! I should say so. Do you ever get any thing bigger than rabbits out here?"
"Didn't you know? Why, right back from where we're going this morning are the mountains. Not a farm till you get away out into the St. Lawrence-river country."
"Yes, I know all that."
"Sometimes the deer come right down, specially in winter. Last winter there was a bear came down and stole one of our hogs, but we got him."
"Got the hog back? Wasn't he hurt?"
"Hurt! Guess he was. The bear killed him. But we followed the bear, and we got him, – Vosh Stebbins and father and me."
Porter tried hard to look as if he were quite accustomed to following and killing all the bears that meddled with his hogs; but Pen exclaimed, —
"Now, Susie, you needn't be scared a bit. There won't be a single bear – not where you're going."
"Won't there?" said Susie almost regretfully. "How I'd like to see one!"
There was a great deal more to be said about bears and other wild creatures; and, just as breakfast was over, there came a great noise of rattling and creaking and shouting in front of the sitting-room windows.
"There he is!" said Corry.
Susie and her brother hurried to look; and there was Vosh Stebbins with Deacon Farnham's great wood-sleigh, drawn by two pairs of strong, long-horned, placid-looking oxen.
"Couldn't one pair draw it?" asked Porter of Corry.
"Guess they could, but two's easier; and, besides, they've nothing else to do. We'll heap it up too. You just wait and see."
There was not long to wait, for the excitement rose fast in the sitting-room, and Susie and Pen were in that sleigh a little in advance of everybody else. Its driver stood by the heads of his first yoke of oxen, and Susie at once exclaimed, —
"Good – morning, Vosh. What a tremendous whip!"
"Why, Susie," said Pen, "that isn't a whip, it's an ox-gad."
"That's it, Pen," said Vosh; but he seemed disposed to talk to his oxen rather than to anybody else. The yoke next the sleigh stood on either side of a long, heavy "tongue;" but the foremost pair were fastened to the end of that by a chain which passed between them to a hook in their yoke. These latter two animals, as Vosh explained to Susie, "were only about half educated, and they took more than their share of driving."
He began to do it for them now, and it was half a wonder to see how accurately the huge beasts kept the right track down through the gate and out into the road. It seemed easier then, for all they had to do was to go straight ahead.
"Let me take the whip, do, please," said Susie; and Vosh only remarked, as he handed it to her, —
"Guess you'll find it heavy."
She lifted it with both hands; and he smiled all over his broad, ruddy face, as she made a desperate effort to swing the lash over the oxen.
"Go 'long now! Git ap! Cluck-cluck."
She chirruped to those oxen with all her might, while Vosh put his handkerchief over his mouth, and had a violent fit of coughing.
"You'll do!" shouted her uncle from behind the sleigh. "That's first-rate. I'll hire you to team it for me all the rest of the winter. – Boys, you'd better put down your guns. Lay them flat, and don't step on 'em."
Porter Hudson had stuck to his gun manfully from the moment it was handed him. He had carried it over his shoulder, slanting it a little across towards the other shoulder. He had seen whole regiments of city soldiers do that, and so he knew it was the correct way to carry a gun. He was now quite willing, however, to imitate Corry, and put his weapon down flat on the bottom of the sleigh. The gun would be safe there; and, besides, he had been watching Vosh Stebbins, and listening, and he had an idea it was time he should show what he knew about oxen. They were plodding along very well, and Susie was letting them alone at the moment.
"Susie," he said, "give me that gad."
Vosh looked somewhat doubtful as she surrendered the whip. They were going up a little ascent, and right beyond them the fences on either side of the road seemed to stop. Beyond that, all was forest, and the