he last
fall ploughing, and dig the last rows of potatoes; when you bank
sawdust, dead leaves or boughs round the barns and the farmhouse; when
you get firewood under cover, and screw on storm windows and hang storm
doors. It is a busy time in Maine, where you must prepare for a long
winter and for twenty degrees below zero.

At last we were ready to start up to the logging camp with the sixteen
horses. We hitched three spans of them to a scoot that had wide, wooden
shoes, and that was loaded high with bags of grain, harnesses, peavies,
shovels, axes, and chains. The other ten horses we led behind by
halters.

Asa Doane, one of our hired men at the farm, drove the three spans on
the scoot; Addison and I sat on the load behind and held the halters of
the led horses. We had often taken horses into the woods in that way,
and expected to have no trouble this time; although these horses were
young, they were not high-spirited or mettlesome. We started at
daybreak, and expected, if all went well, to reach the first of the two
lumber camps by nine o'clock that evening.

We had a passenger with us--an eccentric old hunter named Tommy Goss,
with his traps and gun. He had come to the farm the previous night, on
his way up to his trapping grounds beyond the logging camps, and as his
pack was heavy, he was glad of a lift on the scoot. Tommy was a queer,
reticent old man; I wanted him to tell me about his trapping, but could
get scarcely a word from him. We were pretty busy with our horses,
however, for it is not easy to manage so many halters.

The air was very frosty and sharp in the early morning; but when the sun
came up from a mild, yellow, eastern sky, we felt a little warmer. Not a
breath of wind stirred the tree tops. The leaves had already fallen, and
lay in a dense, damp carpet throughout the forest; the song birds had
gone, and the woods seemed utterly quiet. When a red squirrel
"chickered" at a distance, or when a partridge whirred up, the sound
fell startlingly loud on the air.

There was, indeed, something almost ominous in the stillness of the
morning. As we entered the spruce woods beyond the bushy clearing of the
Old Slave's Farm, Addison cast his eye southward, and remarked that
there was a "snow bank" rising in the sky. Turning, we saw a long,
leaden, indeterminate cloud. It was then about nine o'clock in the
morning.

By ten o'clock the cloud had hidden the sun, and by noon the entire sky
had grown dark.