' and could be trusted 'to look
after things'. We had not been there long when I heard Elizabeth speak
of Nehemiah--her lost son--and his name was often on the lips of others.
He was a boy of sixteen when he went away, and I learned no more of him
until long afterwards.

A month or more after we came to Faraway, I remember we went 'cross lots
in a big box wagon to the orchard on the hill and gathered apples that
fell in a shower when Uncle Eb went up to shake them down. Then cane the
raw days of late October, when the crows went flying southward before
the wind--a noisy pirate fleet that filled the sky at times--and when we
all put on our mittens and went down the winding cow-paths to the grove
of butternuts in the pasture. The great roof of the wilderness had
turned red and faded into yellow. Soon its rafters began to show
through, and then, in a day or two, they were all bare but for some
patches of evergreen. Great, golden drifts of foliage lay higher than
a man's head in the timber land about the clearing. We had our best fun
then, playing 'I spy' in the groves.

In that fragrant deep of leaves one might lie undiscovered a long time.
He could hear roaring like that of water at every move of the finder,
wallowing nearer and nearer possibly, in his search. Old Fred came
generally rooting his way to us in the deep drift with unerring
accuracy.

And shortly winter came out of the north and, of a night, after rapping
at the windows and howling in the chimney and roaring in the big woods,
took possession of the earth. That was a time when hard cider flowed
freely and recollection found a ready tongue among the older folk, and
the young enjoyed many diversions, including measles and whooping cough.

Chapter 7

I had a lot of fun that first winter, but none that I can remember more
gratefully than our trip in the sledgehouse--a tight little house
fitted and fastened to a big sledge. Uncle Eb had to go to mill at
Hillsborough, some twelve miles away, and Hope and I, after much
coaxing and many family counsels, got leave to go with him. The sky was
cloudless, and the frosty air was all aglow in the sunlight that morning
we started. There was a little sheet iron stove in one corner of the
sledgehouse, walled in with zinc and anchored with wires; a layer of
hay covered the floor and over that we spread our furs and blankets. The
house had an open front, and Uncle Eb sat on the doorstep, as it were,
to drive, while we