y that the
opportunity for study was not great, and that his reading was rather
interrupted. There seemed to be always something for him to do, even
when all the rest of the family came as near being idle as is ever
possible in a New England household.

No wonder that John was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying
about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like
to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as
the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to
finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and
the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his
chamber? Why did n't the people who were sleepy go to bed?

How lonesome the old house was; how cold it was, away from that great
central fire in the heart of it; how its timbers creaked as if in the
contracting pinch of the frost; what a rattling there was of windows,
what a concerted attack upon the clapboards; how the floors squeaked,
and what gusts from round corners came to snatch the feeble flame of
the candle from the boy's hand. How he shivered, as he paused at the
staircase window to look out upon the great fields of snow, upon the
stripped forest, through which he could hear the wind raving in a kind
of fury, and up at the black flying clouds, amid which the young moon
was dashing and driven on like a frail shallop at sea. And his teeth
chattered more than ever when he got into the icy sheets, and drew
himself up into a ball in his flannel nightgown, like a fox in his hole.

For a little time he could hear the noises downstairs, and an occasional
laugh; he could guess that now they were having cider, and now apples
were going round; and he could feel the wind tugging at the house, even
sometimes shaking the bed. But this did not last long. He soon went away
into a country he always delighted to be in: a calm place where the
wind never blew, and no one dictated the time of going to bed to any one
else. I like to think of him sleeping there, in such rude surroundings,
ingenious, innocent, mischievous, with no thought of the buffeting he is
to get from a world that has a good many worse places for a boy than
the hearth of an old farmhouse, and the sweet, though undemonstrative,
affection of its family life.

But there were other evenings in the boy's life, that were different
from these at home, and one of them he will never forget. It open