I hope mother got something beside the potatoes
and onions which I remember seeing her pull out and unwrap with
delightful humor--an old and rather pathetic joke but new to us.

The snow fell deep in January and I have many glorious pictures of the
whirling flakes outlined against the darkly wooded hills across the
marsh. Father was busy with his team drawing off wheat and hogs and hay,
and often came into the house at night, white with the storms through
which he had passed. My trips to school were often interrupted by the
cold, and the path which my sister and I trod was along the
ever-deepening furrows made by the bob-sleighs of the farmers. Often
when we met a team or were overtaken by one, we were forced out of the
road into the drifts, and I can feel to this moment, the wedge of snow
which caught in the tops of my tall boots and slowly melted into my gray
socks.

We were not afraid of the drifts, however. On the contrary mother had to
fight to keep us from wallowing beyond our depth. I had now a sled which
was my inseparable companion. I could not feed the hens or bring in a
pan of chips without taking it with me. My heart swelled with pride and
joy whenever I regarded it, and yet it was but a sober-colored thing, a
frame of hickory built by the village blacksmith in exchange for a cord
of wood--delivered. I took it to school one day, but Ed Roche abused it,
took it up and threw it into the deep snow among the weeds.--Had I been
large enough, I would have killed that boy with pleasure, but being
small and fat and numb with cold I merely rescued my treasure as quickly
as I could and hurried home to pour my indignant story into my mother's
sympathetic ears.

I seldom spoke of my defeats to my father for he had once said, "Fight
your own battles, my son. If I hear of your being licked by a boy of
anything like your own size, I'll give you another when you get home."
He didn't believe in molly-coddling, you will perceive. His was a stern
school, the school of self-reliance and resolution.

Neighbors came in now and again to talk of our migration, and yet in
spite of all that, in spite of our song, in spite of my father's
preparation I had no definite premonition of coming change, and when the
day of departure actually dawned, I was as surprised, as unprepared as
though it had all happened without the slightest warning.

So long as the kettle sang on the hearth and the clock ticked on its
shelf, the idea of "movi