Thirty or forty yards farther along the road stood a low, dark house, with the door hanging awry and half the glass in the two front windows broken. Evidently it was a deserted farm. From appearances, no one had lived there for years. But some one had stored a quantity of hay in the mow beside the barn floor; the sheep were already nibbling at it. "I don't know whose hay this is," Addison said, "but the sheep must be fed. The old Squire or Mr. Morey can look up the owners and settle for it afterwards." We strewed armfuls of the hay over the barn floor and let the hungry creatures help themselves. Then we shut the barn doors and went to the old house. Every one knows what a cheerless, forbidding place a deserted house is by night. The partly open door stuck fast; but we squeezed in, and Addison struck a match. One low room occupied most of the interior; there was a fireplace, but so much snow had come down the large chimney that the prospect of having a fire there was poor. As in many old farmhouses, there was a brick oven close beside the fireplace. "Maybe we can light a fire in the oven," Addison said, and after breaking up several old boards we did succeed in kindling a blaze there. The dreary place was not a little enlivened by the firelight. We stood before it, warmed our fingers and munched the cold meat, doughnuts and cheese that the girls had put up for us. But the smoke had disturbed a family of owls in the chimney. Their dismal whooping and chortling, heard in the gloom of the night and the storm, were uncanny to say the least. I wanted to go back to the barn, with the sheep; but Addison was more matter-of-fact. "Oh, let them hoot!" he said. "I am going to stay here and have a fire, if I can find anything to burn." While poking about at the far end of the room for more boards to break up, he found a battered old wardrobe with double doors and called to me to help him drag it in front of the oven. "Going to smash that?" I asked. "No, going to sleep in it," said he. "We'll set it up slantwise before the fire, open the doors and lie down in it. I've a notion that it will keep us warm, even if it isn't very soft." The wardrobe was about four feet wide, and, after propping up the top end at an easy slant, we lay down in it, and took turns getting up to replenish the blaze in the oven. It was not wholly uncomfortable; but any sense of ease that I had begun to feel was banished by a suspicion that Addison now confided to me.