With such delights as these, Harriet was busy, healthy and happy. When her brothers came home from the Academy in the evening and tossed her up in their long arms, her laugh rang out gay and loud as if there were no such thing as disappointment in the world. Sometimes the other children joined her in the magic field of the woodpile. Then they made themselves houses, castles and fortresses. They played at giving parties and entertainments at which the dog and the cat assisted. They held town meetings also, and had voting days with speeches against the Democrats. (The word did not mean then what it does now.) They held religious meetings, too, sung hymns and preached sermons, and on these occasions Harriet was known to exhort and recite texts of Scripture with a degree of fervor that seemed to produce a great effect upon her auditors. Thus the woodpile became a great forum of debate as well as a studio of art, and Harriet was the first to welcome the time when its stores should be reinforced at that great event of the year, the wood-spell. A wood-spell is an old-fashioned sort of donation party. The pastor used to be settled with the understanding that he should receive a certain sum of money as salary, _and his wood_, just as in Easthampton, Long Island, Dr. Beecher’s first pastorate, one-fourth of the whales that were stranded on the beach was assigned to the minister as a part of his yearly payment. In Litchfield a day was set apart in the winter about the time when the sleighs were running most smoothly over the pressed snow, and on that day every parishioner was to bring to the minister a sled-load of wood. This was built up in the back yard of the parsonage into a mighty woodpile for the year’s use. When Harriet was five years old, partly because sorrow had visited the Beecher family that year, and partly because of a quickened religious enthusiasm throughout the community, the wood-spell of that winter was more than usually interesting and the number of loads very generous. With her father’s rejoicing approval, Harriet’s elder sister, Catherine, now sixteen years old, was allowed to take the whole responsibility of preparing the banquet for the occasion. This meant a great deal. Everything in the house must be spick and span; dozens of doughnuts must be cooked; and, above all, the wood-spell cake must be made. For nearly a week the kitchen was as busy as an ant-hill. The fat was prepared to fry the doughnuts, the spices were pounded, the flour was sifted, the materials for the flips were collected. Catherine was assisted by eleven-year-old Mary; William, Edward and George split and brought in an incredible amount of wood for the oven, and the girls sat all the evening about the kitchen fire stoning raisins, with the best story-teller in the midst to make the time pass--and she, we are sure, could have been none other than Harriet.