came so chilled
that we could hardly speak; and at sunset, when we stopped work, we
could hardly get across to the camp. The farmers, who were coming twice
a day with their teams for ice, complained constantly of the cold;
several of them stopped drawing altogether for the time. Willis also
stopped work on Thursday at noon.

The people at home knew that we were having a hard time. Grandmother and
the girls did all they could for us; and every day at noon and again at
night the old Squire, bundled up in his buffalo-skin coat, drove down to
the lake with horse and pung, and brought us a warm meal, packed in a
large box with half a dozen hot bricks.

Only one who has been chilled through all day can imagine how glad we
were to reach that warm camp at night. Indeed, except for the camp, we
could never have worked there as we did. It was a log camp, or rather
two camps, placed end to end, and you went through the first in order to
get into the second, which had no outside door. The second camp had been
built especially for cold weather. It was low, and the chinks between
the logs were tamped with moss. At this time, too, snow lay on it, and
had banked up against the walls. Inside the camp, across one end, there
was a long bunk; at the opposite end stood an old cooking-stove, that
seemed much too large for so small a camp.

At dusk we dropped work, made for the camp, shut all the doors, built
the hottest fire we could make, and thawed ourselves out. It seemed as
though we could never get warmed through. For an hour or more we hovered
about the stove. The camp was as hot as an oven; I have no doubt that we
kept the temperature at 110 deg.; and yet we were not warm.

"Put in more wood!" Addison or Thomas would exclaim. "Cram that stove
full again! Let's get warm!"

We thought so little of ventilation that we shut the camp door tight and
stopped every aperture that we could find. We needed heat to counteract
the effect of those long hours of cold and wind.

By the time we had eaten our supper and thawed out, we grew sleepy, and
under all our bedclothing, curled up in the bunk. So fearful were we
lest the fire should go out in the night that we gathered a huge heap of
fuel, and we all agreed to get up and stuff the stove whenever we waked
and found the fire abating.

Among the neighbors for whom we were cutting ice was Rufus Sylvester. He
was not a very careful or prosperous farmer, and not likely to be
successful at dair