s or ox-yokes, mending things, or sprouting and sorting
potatoes in the cellar.

No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural
hardships of this pioneer farm life; nor did any of the Europeans seem
to know how to find reasonable ease and comfort if they would. The
very best oak and hickory fuel was embarrassingly abundant and cost
nothing but cutting and common sense; but instead of hauling great
heart-cheering loads of it for wide, open, all-welcoming,
climate-changing, beauty-making, Godlike ingle-fires, it was hauled
with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get
it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of doing good. The
only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire-box
about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,--scant
space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero
weather all the family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in
the morning we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid.
We were not allowed to start even this despicable little fire in its
black box to thaw them. No, we had to squeeze our throbbing, aching,
chilblained feet into them, causing greater pain than toothache, and
hurry out to chores. Fortunately the miserable chilblain pain began to
abate as soon as the temperature of our feet approached the
freezing-point, enabling us in spite of hard work and hard frost to
enjoy the winter beauty,--the wonderful radiance of the snow when it
was starry with crystals, and the dawns and the sunsets and white
noons, and the cheery, enlivening company of the brave chickadees and
nuthatches.

The winter stars far surpassed those of our stormy Scotland in
brightness, and we gazed and gazed as though we had never seen stars
before. Oftentimes the heavens were made still more glorious by
auroras, the long lance rays, called "Merry Dancers" in Scotland,
streaming with startling tremulous motion to the zenith. Usually the
electric auroral light is white or pale yellow, but in the third or
fourth of our Wisconsin winters there was a magnificently colored
aurora that was seen and admired over nearly all the continent. The
whole sky was draped in graceful purple and crimson folds glorious
beyond description. Father called us out into the yard in front of the
house where we had a wide view, crying, "Come! Come, mother! Come,
bairns! and see the glory of God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red
lig