ashed out to one side of the
narrow forest road and I to the other. But there was brush and swamp on
both sides. Neither of us could catch up with Old Peg. Stumbling through
the snowy thickets, we tried to get past her half a dozen times, but she
still kept ahead.

She must have gone a mile. When she at last emerged into an opening, we
saw, looming dimly through the storm and the fast-gathering dusk, a
large, weathered barn, with its great doors standing open.

"Well, let her go, confound her!" Addison exclaimed, panting.

Quite out of breath, we gave up the chase and fell behind. Old Peg never
stopped until she was inside that barn. When we caught up with the rout,
she had her flock about her on the barn floor.

"Perhaps it's just as well to let them stay overnight here," Addison
said after we had looked round.

Thirty or forty yards farther along the road stood a low, dark house,
with the door hanging awry and half the glass in the two front windows
broken. Evidently it was a deserted farm. From appearances, no one had
lived there for years. But some one had stored a quantity of hay in the
mow beside the barn floor; the sheep were already nibbling at it.

"I don't know whose hay this is," Addison said, "but the sheep must be
fed. The old Squire or Mr. Morey can look up the owners and settle for
it afterwards."

We strewed armfuls of the hay over the barn floor and let the hungry
creatures help themselves. Then we shut the barn doors and went to the
old house.

Every one knows what a cheerless, forbidding place a deserted house is
by night. The partly open door stuck fast; but we squeezed in, and
Addison struck a match. One low room occupied most of the interior;
there was a fireplace, but so much snow had come down the large chimney
that the prospect of having a fire there was poor. As in many old
farmhouses, there was a brick oven close beside the fireplace.

"Maybe we can light a fire in the oven," Addison said, and after
breaking up several old boards we did succeed in kindling a blaze there.
The dreary place was not a little enlivened by the firelight. We stood
before it, warmed our fingers and munched the cold meat, doughnuts and
cheese that the girls had put up for us.

But the smoke had disturbed a family of owls in the chimney. Their
dismal whooping and chortling, heard in the gloom of the night and the
storm, were uncanny to say the least. I wanted to go back to the barn,
with the sheep; but Addis