completed by the pig-house. The Dutchman, his
wife, and their daughters could go back and forth from the best room to
the beasts without leaving its cover. So, no matter how deep the snow
was, the cattle never lacked for fodder, the hens for feed, or the hogs
for their mash, a boiler of which, sour and fumy, cooked winter and
summer upon the kitchen stove; and, when the fiercest of blizzards was
blowing, the family were in no danger of getting lost between the house
and the barn.

The three rooms of the building that were nearest the Vermilion, though
given different names, were really all bedrooms. A high four-poster of
unplaned boards stood against the low back wall of the sitting-room,
beneath the rack that held the Dutchman's pipes; the sleeping-room,
which the four eldest children occupied, held two smaller beds; and in
the kitchen--where the family ate their breakfasts of coffee-cake and
barley-coffee, their dinners of souse and vegetables and hard bread
broken into a pan of clabbered milk, and supped, without plates, around
a deep bowl of stew--was a wide couch that belonged to the youngest
three.

But on the night of the wedding the first two rooms were empty, except
for benches, the beds having been taken down early in the day and piled
up beside the hay-stacks back of the stable. The couch in the kitchen
was left in its place, however, and was covered from head to foot with
babies.

The house was lighted by barn lanterns, hung out of the way under the
shingles at the upper ends of the bare, sloping roof-joists, and their
dull flames, that leaped and dipped with the moving feet beneath them,
shone upon walls clean and bright in a fresh layer of newspapers, and
revealed, to whomever cast a look upward, the parcels of herbs, seeds,
and sewing thrust here and there in handy crevices of the brown,
cobwebbed ceiling.

The Dutchman's neighbors crowded the rooms to the doors. In the kitchen
were the older women, keeping watch over the couch and, at the same
time, with busy clatter in a half-dozen tongues, unwrapping the edibles
brought for the wedding supper. In the doorway between the other rooms
sat the eldest brother playing his fiddle, the Irishman twanging a
jews'-harp, and "Frenchy" with the bones; and on each side of them
danced the guests.

The newly made bride and her husband led the quadrille in the
sitting-room, opposite a trooper and the neighbor woman; the Swede had
as his partner the new teacher,