s in
town, and if you wanted to get into a store you would generally first
have to hunt up the owner and ask him to open it for you. I saw Mr.
Clerkinwell occasionally. He always spoke kindly and wished me
success. Then the great October blizzard came.

Folks in that country still talk about the October blizzard, and well
they may do so, because the like of it has never been known since. It
came on the twenty-sixth day of October, and lasted three days. It was
as bad as it ought to have been in January, and the people at Track's
End, being new to the country, judged that the winter had come to
stay, and were discouraged; and so most of the rest of them went
away.

It began to snow on the morning of the twenty-fifth, with an east and
northeast wind. The snow came down all day in big flakes, and by
evening it was a foot deep. It turned colder in the night, and the
wind shifted to the northwest. In the morning it was blizzarding. The
air was full of fine snow blown before the wind, and before noon you
could not see across the street. Some of the smaller houses were
almost drifted under. This kept up for three days. Of course the train
could not get through, and the one telegraph wire went down and left
the town like an island alone in the middle of the ocean.

The next day after the blizzard stopped it grew warmer and the snow
began to melt a little, but it was another four days before the train
came. By the time it did come it seemed as if everybody in town was
disgusted or frightened enough to leave. When the second train after
the blizzard had gone back, there were but thirty-two persons, all
told, at Track's End. Only one of these was a woman, and she it was
that was the cause of making me a hotel-keeper on a small scale.

The woman was Mrs. Sours, wife of my employer. One morning, after
every one had left the breakfast-table except her husband and myself,
she said to me:

"Jud, couldn't you run the hotel this winter, now that there are only
three or four boarders left, and them not important nor particular,
only so they get enough to eat?"

"I don't know, ma'am," I said. "I can run the barn, but I'm afraid I
don't know much about a hotel."

"Do you hear the boy say he can do it, Henry?" says she, turning to
her husband. "Of course he can do it, and do it well, too. He always
said his mother taught him how to cook. That means I'm a-going down on
the train to-morrow, and not coming back to this wretched country