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WINTER FUN
BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD
AUTHOR OF "DAB KINZER," "THE QUARTET," "SALTILLO BOYS," ETC.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1885
COPYRIGHT, 1885, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY,
BOSTON.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. ALL AROUND A FIREPLACE
CHAPTER II. RIGHT OUT INTO THE WOODS
CHAPTER III. THE RABBIT-HUNT
CHAPTER IV. WINTER COMFORT
CHAPTER V. A WINTER PICNIC-PARTY
CHAPTER VI. THE DONATION-PARTY
CHAPTER VII. THE WORD-BATTLE AT COBBLEVILLE
CHAPTER VIII. AN OLD-FASHIONED SNOW
CHAPTER IX. GRAND COASTING
CHAPTER X. THE DEER-HUNT ON THE CRUST
CHAPTER XI. ON THE ICE
CHAPTER XII. A VERY EXCITING WINTER EVENING
CHAPTER XIII. A FIRESIDE STORY
CHAPTER XIV. THE BEAR-TRAP
CHAPTER XV. THE NEW CHESSMEN
CHAPTER XVI. WINTER FLOWERS AND THE PARTY
CHAPTER XVII. THE SNOW-FORT
CHAPTER XVIII. THE SUGAR-BUSH AND THE BEAR
CHAPTER XIX. THE FLOOD AND THE END
WINTER FUN.
CHAPTER I.
ALL AROUND A FIREPLACE.
The gate that opened from the yard into the lane leading back to the
barn was directly opposite the side-door of the house. The door was
shut, but the gate was open; and in it stood a gray-haired dame with a
sharp nose and silver-rimmed spectacles. The house behind her was a
small one, white-painted, without blinds to its windows, but with an air
of snug comfort all over it. Just beyond the gate and the woman stood a
tall, vigorous-looking young fellow of not more than eighteen; and his
left hand was on the nose of a nice-looking horse; and behind the horse
was a neat, bright, very red cutter. The boy's face was also somewhat
rosy; and so, for that frosty moment, was the tip of his mother's nose.
"Now, Lavawjer, that there cutter's all you've got to show for about as
hard a month's work as ever you put in; but I won't say that the deacon
drew a hard bargain with ye."
"Well, mother, just look at it."
"I'm a-lookin' at it, and it isn't the cutter it was. You've had it
painted red, and varnished, and you've put on a new goose-neck in place
of the broken one, and there's room in it for two if neither one on 'em
was too heavy."
"That's so, mother; and all you've got to do is just to try it. I'll
take you to meeting in it next Sunday. You ought to see how the colt
gets over the snow with only that cutter behind him."
"I ain't a bit sorry you've got somethin' for him to do. You've been
a-raisin' on him since before he was a yearlin', and he hasn't earned
his keep."
Mrs. Stebbins had made her first look at her son's new cutter a severe
and searching one, and she told him very fully all her thoughts about it
and about the sorrel colt. She was a faithful mother; but there was
pride in her eye, and more red on the tip of her nose, when she turned
to go into the house. He did not hear her say to herself,--
"He's the smartest boy in all Benton Valley, and now he's got the nicest
horse and cutter,--that is, for his age, considerin',--and I ain't one
bit afraid it'll spile him."
He was now leading his sorrel pet, with the jaunty cutter following, out
through the lane to the barn. It was a grand thing, and out of the
common range of human events, for a country-boy of his age to have such
an outfit all his own. Such things can always be accounted for, when you
find them happening. If he were not just a little "spiled," it was no
fault of his mother. She was a widow, and he was her only son; and she
had talked to him and about him pretty steadily from the day he was
born. He looked older than he really was now, and she often said so; but
she sometimes added that he knew enough for a man of forty. She had
named him "Le Voyageur," after a great French traveller whose name she
had seen in a book when she was a girl; but the Valley boys had
massacred all the beauty of it, and shortened it into "Vosh." No other
fellow in all that country had so very remarkable a nickname.
"Now, Jeff," he said, as he cast the sorrel loose from the cutter,
"maybe there's a chance a-coming that you'll have a better-looking load
to haul next time you're hitched in. I'll want ye to show your oats if
you do."
That remark could hardly have referred to Mrs. Stebbins and her next
Sunday's ride to the meeting-house; but Jeff whinnied gently in reply,
as if to express his willingness for any improvement, and Vosh led him
into the stable.
"City folks know some things," he remarked to Jeff, while he poured some
oats in the manger; "but they don't know what good sleighing is. We'll
show 'em, soon as we get some bells; and the deacon's got more buffaloes
than he knows what to do with."
That was a good half-hour before supper, and he seemed in no hurry to
get into the house; but it was odd that his mother, at the very same
time, should have been talking to herself, in default of any other
hearer, about "city folks" and their ways and by-ways and shortcomings.
She seemed to know a great deal about them, and particularly about their
general ignorance concerning snow, ice, cold weather, and all the really
good things of genuine winter. Both she and her son evidently had kindly
and liberal feelings towards the hardest kind of frost, and were free to
say as much, but were in doubt as to whether city people could live and
be comfortable in such weather as had already come. Beyond a doubt, they
were waiting for somebody. There is nothing else in the wide world that
will keep people talking as that will; and Mrs. Stebbins said some
things that sounded as if she were asking questions of the teakettle.
Down the road a little distance, and on the other side of it, a very
different pair of people were even more interested in city folk, and not
in their shortcomings so much as in the fact that certain of them seemed
to be too long a-coming. They were away back in the great old-fashioned
kitchen of a farmhouse, as large as three of the one in which Mrs.
Stebbins was getting supper for Vosh.
"Aunt Judith, I hear 'em!"
"Now, Pen, my child!"
The response came from the milk-room, and was followed by the clatter of
an empty tin milk-pan falling on the floor.
"It sounded like bells."
"It's the wind, Pen. Sakes alive! but they ought to be here by this
time."
"There, aunt Judith!"
Pen suddenly darted out of the kitchen, leaving the long hind-legs of a
big pair of waffle-irons sticking helplessly out from the open door of
the stove.
"Pen! Penelope!--I declare, she's gone. There, I've dropped another pan.
What's got into me to-night? I just do want to see those children. Poor
things, how froze they will be!"
Penelope was pressing her eager, excited little face close to the
frost-flowers on the sitting-room window. It was of no use, cold as it
made the tip of her nose, to strain her blue eyes across the snowy
fields, or up the white, glistening reaches of the road. There was
nothing like a sleigh in sight, nor did her sharpest listening bring her
any sound of coming sleigh-bells.
"Pen! Penelope Farnham! What's that a-burnin'? Sakes alive! if she
hasn't gone and stuck them waffle-irons in the fire! She's put a waffle
in 'em too."
Yes, and the smoke of the lost waffle was carrying tales into the
milk-room.
"O aunt Judith! I forgot. I just wanted to try one."
"Jest like you, Penelope Farnham. You're always a-tryin' somethin'. If
you ain't a trial to me, I wouldn't say so. Now, don't you tetch them
waffles once again, on no account."
"It's all burned as black"--
"Course it is,--black as a coal. I'd ha' thought you'd ha' known
better'n that. Why, when I was ten years old I could ha' cooked for a
fam'ly."
"Guess I could do that," said Pen resolutely; but aunt Judith was
shaking out the smoking remains of the spoiled waffle into the
"pig-pail," and curtly responded,--
"That looks like it. You'll burn up the irons yet."
Half a minute of silence followed, and then she again spoke from the
milk-room:--
"Penelope, look at the sittin'-room fire, and see if it wants any more
wood on it. They'll be chilled clean through when they git here."
Pen obeyed; but it only needed one glance into the great roaring
fireplace to make sure that no kind of chill could keep its hold on
anybody in the vicinity of that blaze.
A stove was handier to cook by, and therefore Mr. Farnham had put aside
his old-fashioned notions, to the extent of having one set up in the
kitchen. The parlor too, he said, belonged to his wife more than it did
to him, and therefore he had yielded again, and there was a stove there
also. It was hard at work now. He had insisted, however, that the wide,
low-ceilinged, comfortable sitting-room should remain a good deal as his
father had left it to him; and there the fireplace held its
wood-devouring own. That was one reason why it was the pleasantest room
in the house, especially on a winter evening.
Penelope had known that fireplace a long while. She had even played
"hide-and-coop" in it in warm weather, when it was bright and clean. But
she thought she had never before seen it so full. "Such a big back-log!"
she exclaimed aloud. But aunt Judith had followed her in to make sure of
the condition of things, and it was her voice that added,--
"Yes, and the fore-stick's a foot through. Your father heaped it up just
before he set out for the village. He might a'most as well have piled
the whole tree in."
"Father likes fire: so do I."
"He's an awful wasteful man with his wood, though. Pen, just you put
down that poker. Do you want to have them there top logs a-rollin'
across the floor?"
"That one lies crooked."
"My child! let it be. I daresn't leave you alone one minute. You'll burn
the house down over our heads, one of these days."
Pen obeyed. She slowly lowered the long, heavy iron rod, and laid it
down on the hearth; but such a fire as that was a terrible temptation.
Almost any man in the world might have been glad to have a good poke at
it, if only to see the showers of sparks go up from the glowing hickory
logs.
"There they come!"
Pen turned away from the fire very suddenly; and aunt Judith put her
hand to her ear, and took off her spectacles, so she could listen
better.
"I shouldn't wonder."
"That's the sleigh-bells! It's our sleigh, I know it is. Shall I begin
to make the waffles?"
"Don't you tetch 'em. Pen, get out that chiny thing your mother got to
put the maple-sirup in."
"Oh, I forgot that."
She brought it out like a flash now; and it must have been the only
thing she had forgotten when she set the table, for she had walked
anxiously around it twenty times, at least, since she put the last plate
in its place.
Faint and far, from away down the road, beyond the turn, the winter wind
brought up the merry jingle of bells. By the time Pen had brought the
china pitcher for the sirup from its shelf in the closet, and once more
darted to the window, she could see her father's black team--blacker
than ever against the snow--trotting towards the house magnificently.
"Don't I wish I'd gone with 'em! But it was Corry's turn. I guess Susie
isn't used to waffles, but she can't help liking 'em."
That was quite possible, but it might also be of some importance whether
Penelope or aunt Judith should have the care of the waffle-irons.
Jingle-jangle-jingle, louder and louder, came the merry bells, till they
stopped at the great gate, and a tall boy sprang out of the sleigh to
open it. The front-door of the house swung open quicker than did the
gate, and Pen was on the stoop, shouting anxiously,--
"Did they come, Corry? Did you get 'em?"
A deep voice from the sleigh responded with a chuckle,--
"Yes, Pen, we caught 'em both. They're right here, and they can't get
away now."
"I see 'em! There's cousin Susie!"
At that moment she remembered to turn and shout back into the house,--
"Aunt Judith, here they are! They've got 'em both!"
But there was her aunt already in the doorway, with the steaming
waffle-irons in one hand.
"Sakes alive, child! You'll freeze the whole house. Poor things! and
they ain't used to cold weather."
Aunt Judith must have had an idea that it was generally summer in the
city.
The sleigh jangled right up to the bottom step of the stoop now. Mr.
Farnham got out first, and was followed by his wife. They were followed
by a very much wrapped-up young lady, into whose arms Pen fairly jumped,
exclaiming,--
"Susie! Susie Hudson!"
There were no signs of frost-bite on Susie's rosy cheeks, and she hugged
Penelope vigorously. Just behind her, a little more dignifiedly, there
descended from the sleigh a boy who may have been two years younger, say
fourteen or fifteen, who evidently felt that the occasion called upon
him for his self-possession.
"Pen," said her mother, "don't you mean to kiss cousin Porter?"
Pen was ready. Her little hands went out, and her bright, welcoming face
was lifted for the kiss; but, if Porter Hudson had been a waffle, he
would not have been burned by it at all. It was not altogether because
he was a boy, and a big one, but that he was more a stranger. Susie had
paid her country-cousins a long summer visit only the year before, while
Porter had not been seen by any of them since he was four years old.
Both he and they had forgotten that he had ever been so small as that.
Mr. Farnham started for the barn, to put away his team, bidding Corry go
on into the house with his cousins. Aunt Judith was at last able to
close the door behind them, and keep any more of the winter from coming
in.
It took but half a minute to help Susie and Porter Hudson get their
things off, and then aunt Judith all but forced them into the chairs she
had set for them in front of the great fireplace.
"What a splendid fire!"
It was Susie said that, with the glow of it making her very pretty face
look brighter and prettier, and very happy. She had already won aunt
Judith's heart over again by being so glad to see her, and she kept
right on winning it, needlessly; for every thing about that room had to
be looked at twice, and admired, and told how nice it was.
"It is indeed a remarkably fine fire," said Porter with emphasis, at the
end of a full minute.
"And we're going to have waffles and maple-sugar for supper," said Pen.
"Don't you like waffles?"
"Yes," said Porter: "they're very nice, no doubt."
"And after such a sleigh-ride," chimed in Susie. "The sleighing is
splendid, beautiful!"
"More snow here than you have in the city?" suggested Corry to Porter.
"Yes, a little; but then, we have to have ours removed as fast as it
comes down,--get it out of the way, you know."
"It isn't in the way here. We'd have a high time of it if we tried to
get rid of our snow."
"I should say you would. And then it does very well where the people
make use of sleighs."
"Don't you have 'em in the city?"
Pen was looking at her cousins with eyes that were full of pity, but at
that moment aunt Judith called to her from the kitchen,--
"Penelope, come and watch the waffle-irons while I make the tea."
"Waffles!" exclaimed Susie. "I never saw any made."
"Come with me, then. I'll show you; that is, if you're warm enough."
"Warm! Why, I wasn't cold one bit. I'm warm as toast."
Out they went; and there were so many errands on the hands of aunt
Judith and Mrs. Farnham just then, that the girls had the kitchen stove
to themselves for a few moments. Pen may have been six years younger,
but she was conscious of a feeling of immense superiority in her
capacity of cook. She kept it until, as she was going over, for Susie's
benefit, a list of her neighbors, and telling what had become of them
since the summer visit, Mr. Farnham came in at the kitchen-door, and
almost instantly exclaimed,--
"Mind your waffles, Pen. You're burning 'em."
"Why, so I did,--that one, just a little. I was telling Susie"--
"A little, my child!" interrupted aunt Judith. "I'd as lief eat burnt
leather. Oh, dear! give me those irons."
"Now, aunt Judith, please fill 'em up for Susie to try. I want to show
her how."
The look on Susie's face was quite enough to keep aunt Judith from
making a breath of objection, and the rich creamy batter was poured into
the smoking moulds.
"Don't you let it burn, Susie," said Pen. "They want to come out when
they're just a good brown. I'll show you."
Susie set out to watch the fate of that waffle most diligently; but she
had not at all counted on what might come in the mean time,--a visitor,
for instance.
Susie had already asked about the Stebbinses, and Pen had answered,--
"They know you're coming. Vosh was here this very morning, and I told
him; and he said he'd be glad to have you call and see him."
"Call and see him? Well."
No more remarks had room to be made in just then; for, only a few
minutes before aunt Judith poured out that waffle, Mrs. Stebbins had
said to her son,--
"I heered the deacon's sleigh come up the road, Lavawjer. Jest you take
a teacup, and go over and borry a drawin' of tea of Miss Farnham. Don't
you miss nothin'. City ways'll spile most anybody; and that there Hudson
gal--Susie, her name was--is likely gettin' stuck up enough by this
time."
She told him a great deal more than that before he got out of the door
with his teacup, and it looked as if he were likely to have questions to
answer when he should come back.
He escaped a little unceremoniously, right in the middle of a long
sentence. And so, just when Susie was most deeply absorbed in her
experiment, there came a loud rap at the kitchen-door; then, without
waiting for any one to come and open it, the door swung back, and in
walked Vosh, as large as life, with the teacup in his hand.
He did look large; but no amount of frost or fire could have made him
color so red as he did when Susie Hudson let go of the irons, and
stepped right forward to shake hands with him.
"How d'ye do, Vosh? How is your mother?"
"Pretty well, thank you. How do you do? Mother's first-rate, but she's
wrong this time. I don't see as you're stuck up a bit. You're just like
you was last summer, only prettier."
The one great weakness in the character of Vosh Stebbins was that he
could not help telling the truth, to save his life. It was very bad for
him sometimes; and now, before Susie could smother her laugh, and make
up her mind what to answer him, he held out his teacup to aunt Judith.
"Miss Farnham, mother told me to borrow a drawing of tea. We ain't out
of tea, by a long ways; but she heard the deacon's sleigh a-coming, and
she wanted to know if the folks from the city'd got here."
"They've come," said aunt Judith shortly, "Susie and her brother. You
tell your mother I wish she'd send me over a dozen of eggs. The skunks
have stolen ours as fast as the hens have laid 'em."
"We've got some," said Vosh. "I'll fetch 'em over.--Susie, where's your
brother?"
"He's in the sitting-room."
"Yes, Vosh," said Pen, "he's there. Walk right in. Corry's there too,
and mother, and--O Susie! Dear me! our waffle's burned again."
"Why! so it is."
"Never mind, Susie," said aunt Judith with the most hospitable
recklessness, as she shook out the proceeds of that careless cookery
upon a plate. "It's only spiled on one side. There's always some of 'em
get burned. Some folks like 'em better when they're kind o' crisp. I'll
fill ye up another."
Vosh looked as if he would willingly stay and see how the next trial
succeeded; but politeness required him to walk on into the sitting-room,
and be introduced to Porter Hudson.
"Vosh," said Corry, "he's never been in the country in winter before in
all his life, and he's come to stay ever so long. So's Susie."
"That's good," began Vosh; but he was interrupted by an invitation from
Mrs. Farnham to stay to supper, and eat some waffles, and he very
promptly replied,--
"Thank you, I don't care if I do. I threw our waffle-irons at Bill
Hinks's dog one day last fall. It most killed him, but it busted the
irons, and we've been 'tending to have 'em mended ever sence. We haven't
done it yet, though, and so we haven't had any waffles."
Aunt Judith had now taken hold of the business at the kitchen stove; for
Susie had made one triumphant success, and she might not do as well next
time. All the rest were summoned to the supper-table.
The room was all one glow of light and warmth. The maple-sugar had been
melted to the exact degree of richness required. The waffles were coming
in rapidly and in perfect condition. Everybody had been hungry, and felt
more so now; and even Porter Hudson was compelled to confess that the
first supper of his winter visit in the country was at least equal to
any he could remember eating anywhere.
"City folks," remarked Penelope, "don't know how to cook waffles, but
I'll teach Susie. Then she can make 'em for you when you go back, only
you can't do it without milk and eggs."
"We can buy 'em."
"Of course you can; but we lay our own eggs, only they get stole. You'll
have to send up here for your maple-sugar."
"We can buy that too, I guess."
"But we get it right out of the woods. You just ought to be here in
sugar-time."
"Pen," said her father, "we're going to keep 'em both till then, and
make them ever so sweet before we let 'em go home."
He was at that moment glancing rapidly from one to another of those four
fresh young faces. He did not tell them so, but he was tracing that very
curious and shadowy thing which we call "a family resemblance." It was
there, widely as the faces varied otherwise; and all their years had not
taken it out of the older faces. Perhaps the city cousins, with especial
help from Susie rather than Porter, had somewhat the advantage in good
looks. They had it in dress also; but when it came to names--well, aunt
Judith herself had had the naming of her brother's children, and she had
done her best by them. Penelope and Coriolanus were every way larger
names than Porter and Susan; and Vosh could have told them that there is
a great deal in a name, if you can get it well boiled down for every-day
use.