e the little camp was like an oven; but the old Squire kept
up the friction. We gave Rufus two or three cups of hot coffee, and in
the course of an hour he was quite himself again.

We kept him at the camp until the afternoon, however, and then started
him home, wrapped in a horse-blanket instead of his army overcoat. He
was none the worse for his misadventure, although he declared we tore
off two inches of his skin!

On Sunday the weather began to moderate, and the last four days of our
ice-cutting were much more comfortable. It had been a severe ordeal,
however; the eighty-one dollars that we collected for it were but scanty
recompense for the misery we had endured.

CHAPTER III

A BEAR'S "PIPE" IN WINTER

After ice-cutting came wood-cutting. It was now the latter part of
January with weather still unusually cold. There were about three feet
of snow on the ground, crusted over from a thaw which had occurred
during the first of the month. In those days we burned from forty to
fifty cords of wood in a year.

There was a wood-lot of a hundred acres along the brook on the east side
of the farm, and other forest lots to the north of it. Only the best
old-growth maple, birch and beech were cut for fuel--great trees two and
three feet in diameter.

The trunks were cut into eight-foot lengths, rolled on the ox-sleds with
levers, and then hauled home to the yard in front of the wood-house,
where they lay in four huge piles till March, when all hands turned to,
with axes and saws, and worked it up.

It was zero weather that week, but bright and clear, with spicules of
frost glistening on every twig; and I recollect how sharply the tree
trunks snapped--those frost snaps which make "shaky" lumber in Maine.

Addison, Halstead and I, with one of the old Squire's hired men, Asa
Doane, went to the wood-lot at eight o'clock that morning and chopped
smartly till near eleven. Indeed, we were obliged to work fast to keep
warm.

Addison and I then stuck our axes in a log and went on the snow crust up
to the foot of a mountain, about half a mile distant, where the hardwood
growth gave place to spruce. We wanted to dig a pocketful of spruce gum.
For several days Ellen and Theodora had been asking us to get them some
nice "purple" gum.

As we were going from one spruce to another, Addison stopped suddenly
and pointed to a little round hole with hard ice about it, near a large,
overhanging rock across which a tree had fa