At length, even old Elder Concannon appeared unexpectedly in the reading-room one night to see what was going on. He came to criticise and remained to play a game of "draughts," as he called them, with Marty Day himself! "Them young scalawags, Elder," declared Massey, when the old gentleman dropped into the drug store afterward. "Them young scalawags are certainly surprising _me_. They behaved themselves more like human bein's than I ever knowed 'em to before. An' it's a nice, neat, warm room, too, ain't it, now?" "Ahem! It appears to be," admitted Elder Concannon, and not so grudgingly as might have been expected. "But where's that young girl who had so much to do with it at first--where's that Day girl?" "Why, pshaw, Elder! _she_ don't have nothing to do with the reading-room," and the druggist's eyes twinkled. "Don't you know that she only _starts_ things in this town? She sets folks up in the business of 'doing for themselves'. Then she goes along about her own business. "What's _that_? Well, I dunno. I'm wonderin' myself just where she'll break out next!" CHAPTER XVII CHRISTMAS NEWS It bade fair to be an old-fashioned northern New England winter. Janice Day had never seen anything like this in the prairie country from which she had come. There three or four big storms, the traces of which soon melted, had been considered a "hard" winter. Here in Poketown the hillside was made white before Thanksgiving, and then one snow after another sifted down upon the mountains. Tree branches in the forest broke under the weight of snow. Sometimes she lay awake in the night and heard the frost burst great trees as though a stick of dynamite had been set off inside them. The lake ice became so thick that the steamboat could no longer make her trips. Walky Dexter became mail carrier and brought the mail from Middletown every other day. Janice found the time not at all tedious in its flight. There really was so much to do! As for real fun--winter sports had been little more than a name to the girl from the Middle West before this winter. The boys had got their bob-sleds out before Thanksgiving. Toboggans were not popular in Poketown, for the coasting-places were too rough. At first Janice was really afraid to join the hilarious parties of boys and girls on some of the slides. Marty, however, owned a big sled, and she did not want her cousin to lose his good opinion of her. He had declared that she was almost as good as a boy, and Janice successfully hid from him her fear of the sport that really is a royal one. A favorite slide of the Poketown young people was from the head of the street on which Hopewell Drugg's store was located, down the hill, past the decayed dock on which Janice had first seen little Lottie Drugg, and on across the frozen inlet to the wooded point in which Lottie declared the echo dwelt.