green, and your maple is gnarly, and the worms eat out your oak like a
sponge. I haven't seen anything like what I call a fire,--not since Mary
Ann was married, and I came here to stay. "As long as you live, father,"
she said; and in that very letter she told me I should always have an
open fire, and how she wouldn't let Jacob put in the air-tight in the
sitting-room, but had the fireplace kept on purpose. Mary Ann was a good
girl always, if I remember straight, and I'm sure I don't complain.
Isn't that a pine-knot at the bottom of the basket? There! that's
better.

Let me see; I began to tell you something, didn't I? O yes; about that
winter of '41. I remember now. I declare, I can't get over it, to think
you never heard about it, and you twenty-four year old come Christmas.
You don't know much more, either, about Maine folks and Maine fashions
than you do about China,--though it's small wonder, for the matter of
that, you were such a little shaver when Uncle Jed took you. There were
a great many of us, it seems to me, that year, I 'most forget how
many;--we buried the twins next summer, didn't we?--then there was Mary
Ann, and little Nancy, and--well, coffee was dearer than ever I'd seen
it, I know, about that time, and butter selling for nothing; we just
threw our milk away, and there wasn't any market for eggs; besides
doctor's bills and Isaac to be sent to school; so it seemed to be the
best thing, though your mother took on pretty badly about it at first.
Jedediah has been good to you, I'm sure, and brought you up
religious,--though you've cost him a sight, spending three hundred and
fifty dollars a year at Amherst College.

But, as I was going to say, when I started to talk about '41,--to tell
the truth, Johnny, I'm always a long while coming to it, I believe. I'm
getting to be an old man,--a little of a coward, maybe, and sometimes,
when I sit alone here nights, and think it over, it's just like the
toothache, Johnny. As I was saying, if she had cut that wick straight, I
do believe it wouldn't have happened,--though it isn't that I mean to
lay the blame on her _now_.

I'd been out at work all day about the place, slicking things up for
to-morrow; there was a gap in the barn-yard fence to mend,--I left that
till the last thing, I remember,--I remember everything, some way or
other, that happened that day,--and there was a new roof to put on the
pig-pen, and the grape-vine needed an extra layer of straw, and t