rm cabin.

4

It didn't take more'n several jiffies for all of us to be inside that
old-fashioned cabin, where there was a crackling fire in his fireplace
and another fire roaring in his kitchen stove and where there was a
teakettle singing like everything, meaning that pretty soon we'd have
some sassafras tea. In fact, as soon as the trap-door was down and we
were all sitting or standing or half lying down on his couch and on
chairs, the old man put some sassafras chips from sassafras tree-roots
into a pan on the stove and poured boiling water on it, and let it
start to boil. Almost right away the water began to turn as red as the
chips themselves and Little Jim's eyes grew very bright as he watched
the water boil.

One of the first things I noticed when I looked around the room a
little was the old man's Bible which was open to the Sunday School
lesson, like maybe he'd been studying, getting ready for church
tomorrow. I knew it was tomorrow's lesson 'cause at our house we had
already studied the same lesson two or three times, on account of Mom
and Pop always started to study next week's lesson a whole week ahead
of time, so, as Pop says, "different ideas will come popping into
our heads all week long even while we're working or studying or
something." I knew Little Jim's parents always started studying their
lessons the first thing in the week, also, and maybe that was why that
little guy was always thinking of so many things that were important.

From where I was sitting, I could look through a clear place in the
old man's kitchen window which didn't have any frost on it, and I
could see the shadow the smoke was making which was coming out of the
chimney, and the longish darkish shadow was moving up the side of the
old man's woodshed out there, and on up the slant of the snow-covered
roof, making me think of a great big long darkish worm twisting and
squirming and crawling up a stick in the summer-time.... There must
have been almost a foot of snow on the roof of that woodshed, I
thought, and that reminded me of the snow man at the bottom of
Bumblebee hill, and when I noticed that the shadows of the trees out
there were getting very long it meant that it wouldn't be long till
the sun went down, and if Poetry and I were to get a good picture of
Mr. Black's snow statue, we'd have to hurry.

Old Man Paddler all of a sudden spoke up and said to us, looking
especially at me, "One of you boys want to take th