A Busy Year at the Old Squire'sStephens, C. A. (Charles Asbury)
History
A Busy Year at the Old Squire's
Stephens, C. A. (Charles Asbury)
Domestic fiction, American; Farm life -- Maine -- Fiction; Maine -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Only one who has been chilled through all day can imagine how glad we
were to reach that warm camp at night. Indeed, except for the camp, we
could never have worked there as we did. It was a log camp, or rather
two camps, placed end to end, and you went through the first in order to
get into the second, which had no outside door. The second camp had been
built especially for cold weather. It was low, and the chinks between
the logs were tamped with moss. At this time, too, snow lay on it, and
had banked up against the walls. Inside the camp, across one end, there
was a long bunk; at the opposite end stood an old cooking-stove, that
seemed much too large for so small a camp.
At dusk we dropped work, made for the camp, shut all the doors, built
the hottest fire we could make, and thawed ourselves out. It seemed as
though we could never get warmed through. For an hour or more we hovered
about the stove. The camp was as hot as an oven; I have no doubt that we
kept the temperature at 110 deg.; and yet we were not warm.
"Put in more wood!" Addison or Thomas would exclaim. "Cram that stove
full again! Let's get warm!"
We thought so little of ventilation that we shut the camp door tight and
stopped every aperture that we could find. We needed heat to counteract
the effect of those long hours of cold and wind.
By the time we had eaten our supper and thawed out, we grew sleepy, and
under all our bedclothing, curled up in the bunk. So fearful were we
lest the fire should go out in the night that we gathered a huge heap of
fuel, and we all agreed to get up and stuff the stove whenever we waked
and found the fire abating.
Among the neighbors for whom we were cutting ice was Rufus Sylvester. He
was not a very careful or prosperous farmer, and not likely to be
successful at dairying. But because the old Squire and others were
embarking in that business, Rufus wished to do so, too. He had no
ice-house, but thought he could keep ice buried in sawdust, in the shade
of a large apple-tree near his barn; and I may add here that he tried it
with indifferent success for three years, and that it killed the
apple-tree.
On Saturday of that cold week he came to the lake with his lame old
horse and a rickety sled, and wanted us to cut a hundred cakes of ice
for him. The prospect of our getting our pay was poor. Saturday,
moreover, was the coldest, windiest day of the whole week; the
temperature was down to fourteen degrees below.
Halse and Thomas said no; but he hung round, and teased us, while his
half-starved old horse shivered in the wind; and we finally decided to
oblige him, if he would take the tongs and haul out the cakes himself,
as we sawed them. It would not do to stop the saws that day, even for a
moment.
Rufus had on an old blue army overcoat, the cape of which was turned up
over his head and ears, and a red woolen "comforter" round his neck. He
wore long-legged, stiff cowhide boots, with his trousers tucked into the
tops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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