CHAPTER I.
ALL AROUND A FIREPLACE

The gate that opened from the yard into the lane leading back to the barn was directly opposite the side-door of the house. The door was shut, but the gate was open; and in it stood a gray-haired dame with a sharp nose and silver-rimmed spectacles. The house behind her was a small one, white-painted, without blinds to its windows, but with an air of snug comfort all over it. Just beyond the gate and the woman stood a tall, vigorous-looking young fellow of not more than eighteen; and his left hand was on the nose of a nice-looking horse; and behind the horse was a neat, bright, very red cutter. The boy's face was also somewhat rosy; and so, for that frosty moment, was the tip of his mother's nose.

"Now, Lavawjer, that there cutter's all you've got to show for about as hard a month's work as ever you put in; but I won't say that the deacon drew a hard bargain with ye."

"Well, mother, just look at it."

"I'm a-lookin' at it, and it isn't the cutter it was. You've had it painted red, and varnished, and you've put on a new goose-neck in place of the broken one, and there's room in it for two if neither one on 'em was too heavy."

"That's so, mother; and all you've got to do is just to try it. I'll take you to meeting in it next Sunday. You ought to see how the colt gets over the snow with only that cutter behind him."

"I ain't a bit sorry you've got somethin' for him to do. You've been a-raisin' on him since before he was a yearlin', and he hasn't earned his keep."

Mrs. Stebbins had made her first look at her son's new cutter a severe and searching one, and she told him very fully all her thoughts about it and about the sorrel colt. She was a faithful mother; but there was pride in her eye, and more red on the tip of her nose, when she turned to go into the house. He did not hear her say to herself, —

"He's the smartest boy in all Benton Valley, and now he's got the nicest horse and cutter, – that is, for his age, considerin', – and I ain't one bit afraid it'll spile him."

He was now leading his sorrel pet, with the jaunty cutter following, out through the lane to the barn. It was a grand thing, and out of the common range of human events, for a country-boy of his age to have such an outfit all his own. Such things can always be accounted for, when you find them happening. If he were not just a little "spiled," it was no fault of his mother. She was a widow, and he was her only son; and she had talked to him and about him pretty steadily from the day he was born. He looked older than he really was now, and she often said so; but she sometimes added that he knew enough for a man of forty. She had named him "Le Voyageur," after a great French traveller whose name she had seen in a book when she was a girl; but the Valley boys had massacred all the beauty of it, and shortened it into "Vosh." No other fellow in all that country had so very remarkable a nickname.

"Now, Jeff," he said, as he cast the sorrel loose from the cutter, "maybe there's a chance a-coming that you'll have a better-looking load to haul next time you're hitched in. I'll want ye to show your oats if you do."

That remark could hardly have referred to Mrs. Stebbins and her next Sunday's ride to the meeting-house; but Jeff whinnied gently in reply, as if to express his willingness for any improvement, and Vosh led him into the stable.

"City folks know some things," he remarked to Jeff, while he poured some oats in the manger; "but they don't know what good sleighing is. We'll show 'em, soon as we get some bells; and the deacon's got more buffaloes than he knows what to do with."

That was a good half-hour before supper, and he seemed in no hurry to get into the house; but it was odd that his mother, at the very same time, should have been talking to herself, in default of any other hearer, about "city folks" and their ways and by-ways and shortcomings. She seemed to know a great deal about them, and particularly about their general ignorance concerning snow, ice, cold weather, and all the really good things of genuine winter. Both she and her son evidently had kindly and liberal feelings towards the hardest kind of frost, and were free to say as much, but were in doubt as to whether city people could live and be comfortable in such weather as had already come. Beyond a doubt, they were waiting for somebody. There is nothing else in the wide world that will keep people talking as that will; and Mrs. Stebbins said some things that sounded as if she were asking questions of the teakettle.

Down the road a little distance, and on the other side of it, a very different pair of people were even more interested in city folk, and not in their shortcomings so much as in the fact that certain of them seemed to be too long a-coming. They were away back in the great old-fashioned kitchen of a farmhouse, as large as three of the one in which Mrs. Stebbins was getting supper for Vosh.

"Aunt Judith, I hear 'em!"

"Now, Pen, my child!"

The response came from the milk-room, and was followed by the clatter of an empty tin milk-pan falling on the floor.

"It sounded like bells."

"It's the wind, Pen. Sakes alive! but they ought to be here by this time."

"There, aunt Judith!"

Pen suddenly darted out of the kitchen, leaving the long hind-legs of a big pair of waffle-irons sticking helplessly out from the open door of the stove.

"Pen! Penelope! – I declare, she's gone. There, I've dropped another pan. What's got into me to-night? I just do want to see those children. Poor things, how froze they will be!"

Penelope was pressing her eager, excited little face close to the frost-flowers on the sitting-room window. It was of no use, cold as it made the tip of her nose, to strain her blue eyes across the snowy fields, or up the white, glistening reaches of the road. There was nothing like a sleigh in sight, nor did her sharpest listening bring her any sound of coming sleigh-bells.

"Pen! Penelope Farnham! What's that a-burnin'? Sakes alive! if she hasn't gone and stuck them waffle-irons in the fire! She's put a waffle in 'em too."

Yes, and the smoke of the lost waffle was carrying tales into the milk-room.

"O aunt Judith! I forgot. I just wanted to try one."

"Jest like you, Penelope Farnham. You're always a-tryin' somethin'. If you ain't a trial to me, I wouldn't say so. Now, don't you tetch them waffles once again, on no account."

"It's all burned as black" —

"Course it is, – black as a coal. I'd ha' thought you'd ha' known better'n that. Why, when I was ten years old I could ha' cooked for a fam'ly."

"Guess I could do that," said Pen resolutely; but aunt Judith was shaking out the smoking remains of the spoiled waffle into the "pig-pail," and curtly responded, —

"That looks like it. You'll burn up the irons yet."

Half a minute of silence followed, and then she again spoke from the milk-room: —

"Penelope, look at the sittin'-room fire, and see if it wants any more wood on it. They'll be chilled clean through when they git here."

Pen obeyed; but it only needed one glance into the great roaring fireplace to make sure that no kind of chill could keep its hold on anybody in the vicinity of that blaze.

A stove was handier to cook by, and therefore Mr. Farnham had put aside his old-fashioned notions, to the extent of having one set up in the kitchen. The parlor too, he said, belonged to his wife more than it did to him, and therefore he had yielded again, and there was a stove there also. It was hard at work now. He had insisted, however, that the wide, low-ceilinged, comfortable sitting-room should remain a good deal as his father had left it to him; and there the fireplace held its wood-devouring own. That was one reason why it was the pleasantest room in the house, especially on a winter evening.

Penelope had known that fireplace a long while. She had even played "hide-and-coop" in it in warm weather, when it was bright and clean. But she thought she had never before seen it so full. "Such a big back-log!" she exclaimed aloud. But aunt Judith had followed her in to make sure of the condition of things, and it was her voice that added, —

"Yes, and the fore-stick's a foot through. Your father heaped it up just before he set out for the village. He might a'most as well have piled the whole tree in."

"Father likes fire: so do I."

"He's an awful wasteful man with his wood, though. Pen, just you put down that poker. Do you want to have them there top logs a-rollin' across the floor?"

"That one lies crooked."

"My child! let it be. I daresn't leave you alone one minute. You'll burn the house down over our heads, one of these days."

Pen obeyed. She slowly lowered the long, heavy iron rod, and laid it down on the hearth; but such a fire as that was a terrible temptation. Almost any man in the world might have been glad to have a good poke at it, if only to see the showers of sparks go up from the glowing hickory logs.

"There they come!"

Pen turned away from the fire very suddenly; and aunt Judith put her hand to her ear, and took off her spectacles, so she could listen better.

"I shouldn't wonder."

"That's the sleigh-bells! It's our sleigh, I know it is. Shall I begin to make the waffles?"

"Don't you tetch 'em. Pen, get out that chiny thing your mother got to put the maple-sirup in."

"Oh, I forgot that."

She brought it out like a flash now; and it must have been the only thing she had forgotten when she set the table, for she had walked anxiously around it twenty times, at least, since she put the last plate in its place.

Faint and far, from away down the road, beyond the turn, the winter wind brought up the merry jingle of bells. By the time Pen had brought the china pitcher for the sirup from its shelf in the closet, and once more darted to the window, she could see her father's black team – blacker than ever against the snow – trotting towards the house magnificently.

"Don't I wish I'd gone with 'em! But it was Corry's turn. I guess Susie isn't used to waffles, but she can't help liking 'em."

That was quite possible, but it might also be of some importance whether Penelope or aunt Judith should have the care of the waffle-irons.