f increase, winter was his time of trade and his time of
recreation as well. When wintry blasts grew chill, and snow and ice
covered deep the desolate fields and country roads, then he prepared
with zest and with delight for his gelid time of outing, his Arctic
red-letter day, his greatest social pleasure of the entire year. The
friendly word was circulated by a kind of estafet from farm to farm, was
carried by neighbor or passing traveller, or was discussed and planned
and agreed upon in the noon-house, or at the tavern chimney-side on
Sunday during the nooning, that on a certain date--unless there set in
the tantalizing and swamping January thaw, a thaw which might be pushing
and unseasonable enough to rush in in December and quite as often hung
off and dawdled into February--that on the appointed date, at break of
day, the annual ride to market would begin. Often fifty or sixty
neighbors would respond to the call, would start together on the road.
For farmers in western Vermont and Massachusetts the market town was
Troy or other Hudson valley towns. In Maine, from Bath and Hallowell and
neighboring towns, the winter procession rode to Portland. In central
Massachusetts some drove to Northampton, Springfield, or Hartford; but
the greatest number of farmers and the largest amount of farm produce
went to the towns of the Massachusetts coast, to Salem, to Newburyport,
and, above all, to Boston.

The two-horse pung or the single-horse pod, shod with steel shoes an
inch thick, was closely packed with the accumulated farm wealth--whole
pigs, perhaps a deer or two, firkins of butter, casks of cheese, four
cheeses in each cask, bags of beans, pease or corn, skins of mink, fox,
and fisher-cat that the boys had trapped, birch brooms that the boys had
made, yarn that their sisters had spun, and stockings and mittens that
they had knitted--in short, anything that a New England farm could
produce that would sell to any profit in a New England town. So closely
was the sleigh packed, in fact, that the driver could not be seated. The
sturdy and hardy farmer stood on a little semicircular step in the rear
of the sleigh, his body protected by the high sleigh back against the
sharp icy blasts. At times he ran alongside or behind his vehicle to
keep his blood in brisk circulation.

Though every inch of the sleigh was packed to its fullest extent, there
was always found room in some corner for plenty of food to last the
thrifty traveller