The cows were back in the stable, and Mike had revised his opinion of cork-asphalt floors when he realized the ease of cleaning with a hose; the potatoes and apples and onions and beets and carrots for our family use were stored in barrels and bins in the cellar, or spread on shelves, or buried in sand. The vegetable garden was newly ploughed, and manure spread on the hayfield. Antony and Cleopatra had been captured and brought into the dining-room, where they were to spend the winter in a glass bowl. Epictetus and Luella and Gladys and Gaynor had all burrowed out of sight into the ground. The pageant of autumn on our hills was over, only an amethyst haze succeeding at sunset time. Wood fires sparkled on our twin hearths. The summer residents had departed. Our first Thanksgiving turkey had been eaten, though a great stone crock of Mrs. Pillig's incomparable mincemeat still yielded up its treasures for ambrosial pies. "And now," said Stella, "I'm going to find out at last what a country winter is like!" "And your friends are pitying you down in town," said I. "Don't you want to go back to them till spring?" Stella looked at the fires, she looked out over the bare garden and the ploughed fields to the dun hillsides, she listened a moment to the whistle of the bleak December wind, she looked at me. In her eyes I read her answer. Chapter XXII IN PRAISE OF COUNTRY WINTER Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all. From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies, of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet, close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into "a tumultuous privacy of storm." Our first winter began one bleak November day when the lone pine in the potato field was outlined black against a gray sky, and over the long mountain wall to the northwest came suddenly a puff of white vapour, like the beginning of artillery fire, and then the shrapnel of the snow descended upon us. Wrapped against it, we ran about the farm, marvelling at the transformations it wrought. First it filled up the furrows on the ploughed land, making our field like a zebra's back. Then it whitened the sundial lawn, reminding us to take the wooden dial post in for the winter. Then it whitened the brown earth around the pool, where our July-sown grass had failed to make a catch, and presently the pool was a black mirror on a field of white.