pack down into the
hardness of marble.

There were many "chores" to be done these cold mornings before any
household could draw a breath of comfort. The Baxters kept but one cow
in winter, killed the pig,--not to eat, but to sell,--and reduced the
flock of hens and turkeys; but Waitstill was always as busy in the
barn as in her own proper domain. Her heart yearned for all the dumb
creatures about the place, intervening between them and her father's
scanty care; and when the thermometer descended far below zero she
would be found stuffing hay into the holes and cracks of the barn
and hen-house, giving the horse and cow fresh beddings of straw and a
mouthful of extra food between the slender meals provided by the Deacon.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon and a fire in the Baxters' kitchen
since six in the morning had produced a fairly temperate climate in
that one room, though the entries and chambers might have been used for
refrigerators, as the Deacon was as parsimonious in the use of fuel
as in all other things, and if his daughters had not been hardy young
creatures, trained from their very birth to discomforts and exposures of
every sort, they would have died long ago.

The Baxter kitchen and glittered in all its accustomed cleanliness and
order. Scrubbing and polishing were cheap amusements, and nobody grudged
them to Waitstill. No tables in Riverboro were whiter, no tins more
lustrous, no pewter brighter, no brick hearths ruddier than hers. The
beans and brown bread and Indian pudding were basking in the warmth of
the old brick oven, and what with the crackle and sparkle of the fire,
the gleam of the blue willow-ware on the cupboard shelves, and the
scarlet geraniums blooming on the sunny shelf above the sink, there were
few pleasanter place to be found in the village than that same Baxter
kitchen. Yet Waitstill was ill at ease this afternoon; she hardly knew
why. Her father had just put the horse into the pung and driven up
to Milliken's Mills for some grain, and Patty was down at the store
instructing Bill Morrill (Cephas Cole's successor) in his novel task
of waiting on customers and learning the whereabouts of things; no easy
task in the bewildering variety of stock in a country store; where
pins, treacle, gingham, Epsom salts, Indian meal, shoestrings, shovels,
brooms, sulphur, tobacco, suspenders, rum, and indigo may be demanded in
rapid succession.

Patty was quiet and docile these days, though her