It was a strange enough sight to a southerner, inured to winter fogs and dripping skies; and the uncommonness of it--the shriek and sting and the mad dance--awoke a responsive frenzy in my blood. _This_ was the right challenge to my mood--something that I could close and wrestle with and battle through to an end. I rejoiced, as if my formless visions of retribution had actually at last assumed a definite shape and substance. It was Spartan work, nevertheless, dressing, and washing in a pool of slushy ice, and fetching wood and coal, and preparing the house generally against the siege of frost which threatened it. An advance picket of the enemy already occupied the lower rooms, and had to be driven out under a hot fire from the grate. I must keep an eye to my provisioning too, in case I should come to be cut off from my base--snowed up, and prevented from reaching the house, in short. Of ordinary fare I had always made a point of storing a plentiful supply, in order to avoid the worry of a daily commissariat, and of this supply I found to my relief there was ample remainder. Biscuits; jolly great potatoes for roasting in their winter jackets, and good to be eaten, crumbling hot, with salt and pepper and perhaps a little yellow flake of butter in their middles; rashers from a half-side of bacon, which hung, like an old rusty coat, in the chimney-corner of my tiny kitchen; eggs, when I could get them, and at whose endless manipulations in a chafing dish I had become expert; dates, figs, a canvas bag of chestnuts, and, for drink, coffee and hot whisky grog with sugar and lemon peel--these made the staple of my diet, and, with tobacco, were sufficient to the needs of any proper woodland hermit. But there were perishable goods in addition not to be despised--bread, milk, and butter, to wit; and for my daily supply of these I was accustomed to look to the good offices of my old friend Comely the steward, who had never yet failed me in his service of them. Well, I must, if needs must, come to drink my coffee black, and lard my toasted biscuits with pig’s fat. It would be no such terrible deprivation after all.