The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind
factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for
sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these
robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft.
Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business
block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled
in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without
much change. It could never have been a very luxurious dwelling, and
my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than
that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region
is rough and fierce; and the lake winds have a malice sharper than
the saltiest gales of the North Shore of Massachusetts. I know that
there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, full
of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from
some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the
winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the
frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country
roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the
“slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to
April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a
little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village,
and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the
morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion
for Don Quixote, and I was then, at the age of fifteen, preparing to
write a life of Cervantes. This scheme occupied me a good deal in those
bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that
my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would
get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that
life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to
make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots
froze.