We are at the very heart of winter now.

We are at the very heart of winter now.  It is “le grand frête,” that I have been secretly dreading, and all my ideas of it are changing as the quiet days go on.  Winter in the woods has always seemed to me the dead time—the season of darkness and loneliness and loss.  I find it only the pause before the birth of a new year.  If I break off a twig, it is green at the heart, when I brush away the snow, the moss springs green beneath it.  Close against the breast of the meadow lie the steadfast, evergreen rosettes of the plantain, sorrel, moth mullen, and evening primrose, waiting in patience for the melting of the snow.  I never dip a pail into the hole in the ice without bringing up a long trailer of green waterweed, or a darting, flitting little whirligig beetle—the gyrinus—somewhat less lively than in summer, to be sure, but still active and alert.  There is a big, fresh-water clam lying at the bottom of the waterhole.  He breathes and palpitates, lolling out a soft pink body from the lips of a half-open shell.

Yes, winter here is only a slumber, and everything is stirring in its sleep.  They all proclaim again the old, old covenant, made with the perpetual generations, that promise of the sure return of seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night, that shall not cease while the earth remains.

The colors of winter are slate-blue and gray, laid on a background of black and white.  The chickadees and nuthatches wear them—black velvet caps, gray coats, white waistcoats.  In the mornings long, slate-blue shadows stretch away from the points of all the islands, and every smallest standing weed casts its tiny blue shadow across the snow.  The ice is darkly iridescent, like the blue pigeon’s neck and head.

The dawns come late, the sunsets early, and in the twilight the mice steal out from the woods and climb up and down on the window screens, little misty, gray blurs moving swiftly against the soft, gray dusk.

Through the long evenings, when supper is over, the curtains drawn and the long sides of the big box stove glowing red, I read and think and dream.  All the while the timbers of the house crack and snap with the cold, the trees twist and creak in the wind, and the ice groans and mutters.  Now and again it gives a long sigh, as though some heavy animal were imprisoned under it and were struggling to escape.  I imagine him heaving at it with a great shoulder, grunting as he pushes, and sinking back to rest before pushing again.  Late in the night comes a long roar, as though the beast had broken forth and were calling to his mate.

Most people undress to go to bed.  Here I undress and dress again, putting on heaviest woolen underwear, long knit stockings, flannel gown and sweater over all.  I creep into bed and lie between flannel sheets and under piled blankets, and throw a fur coat across the foot, in preparation for that first hurried dash across the room at dawn.

There is only one anguished moment in the twenty-four hours.  It is when the fire has burned out, and the cold wakes me.  My movements then are reduced to the least possible number.  Almost with one motion I spring out of bed, fling the window shut, tear back the whole top of the stove, throw in fresh logs, put on the coffeepot, then skurry back to bed to doze until the cabin is warm.

There is not the least trouble about keeping my stores cool.  The problem is to prevent their freezing.  The potatoes and eggs freeze in the very room with me, a pot of soup, set in the outer vestibule, is a hard block from which I crack a piece with the ax when I wish a hot supper.  The condensed milk is hard frozen, the canned plum puddings rattle about in their tins like so many paving stones, and it takes all day to heat them.  Early in December, I laid a jagged bit of ice on the corner of the porch, and there it lies, its shape quite unchanged through weeks of bitter weather.

There is an inch or two of ice over the waterhole every morning.  When I go to fill the pails, I take the little ax along to chop my cistern open, but gradually the walls of ice close in and about once a week someone must cut me a fresh waterhole in another spot on the lake.

The drying of the weekly wash is a most perplexing thing.  Clothes hung outside the house freeze immediately of course.  If they are hung inside, the room is filled with their steam.  My only plan is to heat the cabin red-hot, hang them indoors, bank the fire for safety and take to the lake or go a-visiting, for a certain number of clean clothes one must have, if only to keep up one’s self-respect.

This morning I woke so stiff with cold that I was almost afraid to move in bed, lest a frozen finger or toe should drop off.  There was no more sleep, so, cowering over the stove, I watched the sunrise, more augustly beautiful than I have ever seen it.  The bright crescent of last month’s moon hung, point downward, on a sky of mouse-gray velvet.  Over it stood the morning star.  Along the eastern horizon lay a line of soft brightness, that glowed through a veil of gray gauze.  Very slowly this bright line widened while the snow field grew slate-blue, then purple, and the jagged tree line of the forest stood out in silhouette, black pines, cedars, and hemlocks against a yellow sky.  Trees and bushes near at hand stole out from the shadows, patterns of black lace against the white ground, and sharply visible.  The horizon line was now tinged with red, the sky was changing to a tender yellow-gray, shading to pale green as it neared the zenith.  The paling moon hung now against a background of rose and saffron.  The star still blazed above it like a lamp, until, suddenly, a fiery streak appeared on the horizon, and star and moon faded away before the red disk of the sun.

Toward noon the cold was less intense, and I ventured out to get some long-delayed mail at the farm.  Not a bird was abroad, not a rabbit track lay on the paths.  In fur coat, fur hood, and high rubber boots I plowed a way across the lake, where the level snow, knee-high, drifted in over the tops of the boots and formed an icy crust around my stockinged feet.  At the farm I learned that the thermometer at Loon Lake Station had registered thirty-five degrees below zero at seven o’clock that morning.  Even then, in the sun, on the Blakes’ south porch it stood at twenty below.

At home in the afternoon all my little pensioners were out to greet me.  The white-breasted nuthatch was clinging, head down, on a birch pillar, his head, twisted back at a neck-dislocating angle, showed his black cap perched over one eye, and gave him an indescribably rakish, disreputable appearance.

“Yank, yank,” he observed, irritably, as though to chide me for keeping him waiting so long for food.  The air was full of the plaintive winter notes of the chickadees.  Peter, the rabbit, was sitting hunched against the kitchen door, a forlorn little figure.

The feeding of my live stock has become quite a large part of the duty of each day.  The rabbit waits at the door for his slice of bread, and, if that door is left ajar, he is quite apt to hop inside and help himself to anything he finds standing on the hearth.  The squirrel has his toast and cold potato on the woodpile, the birds their crumbs.  The bushes present a very odd appearance, hung with bits of bacon rind for the chickadees.

The other night there came another little boarder, in the person of a very small deer mouse, that slipped into the cabin and fell down between the wire screen and the lower casement of the north window.  Between the netting and the window frame there is space enough to make a very satisfactory runway for a very tiny mouse, and there he cowered, peering at me, with terrified, bright eyes.  The window panes open in on hinges, like a French casement, so my first impulse was to shut the upper half and keep him prisoner, knowing that if he once ran at large in the house I could never catch him, and that he would make havoc among the stores.  He looked so hungry, trembling there, with his tiny, pink hands clasped on his breast, that I dropped him down a bit of bacon.  Then he shivered so piteously that I dropped also a fluff of absorbent cotton, which he seized and instantly made into a little Esquimeau hut.  This he placed in the corner best sheltered from the wind, turned its door in toward the glass, and retired, closing that opening with a bit of cotton, and I saw him no more by day.

A deer mouse is the prettiest little beast imaginable, somewhat smaller than the house mouse, and with very large eyes.  His fur is dark brown, very soft and thick and with a darker streak along the spine.  His breast is white, his legs white too, ending in tiny pink paws with wee fingernails, the exact size of the eye of a number five needle.  His ears are long and fringed with black, his head very much like the head of a doe.  He is nocturnal in habit, staying up in the morning until after his breakfast and mine, then retiring for the day, to come out at twilight and run up and down the window screen for exercise.  So long as I keep this window closed he can’t get out, and I can study him through the glass at my leisure.

Who ever sees a deer mouse at home?  Walking through the stubble field one sometimes starts one, and away he goes like a flash.  Here I have this little wild thing living in my house, apparently quite content.  He shall stay as long as he seems well and happy.  When I think he is pining he shall go free, but he is quite as well off in his little hut as he would be in the cast-off vireo’s nest that is, in all probability, his winter home.  Snow drifts in and covers it, to be sure, but he seems snug and warm and is growing sleek and fat on a diet of bacon and apple.

Since the coming of the ice I find that I must keep more cooked stores on hand, not only for myself and for the birds and beasts, but for the frequent visitors that come driving up the lake to the door.  They race along the ice in sleighs and buggies and stop at the island.  When they come they stay to the next meal, so there must be materials for a party always ready.  It is only fair to state that the rule works quite as well the other way round, for I am always welcome to drop in at any house near which I happen to be at meal time.  Any passing guest may draw his chair to the table and partake of what is set thereon.  No apologies are offered for the food.  It may be only a pot of tea and a biscuit, but whatever it is you are welcome, and that, by your leave, is hospitality.

Oh, Many Islands, place of the good neighbors!  I close my eyes to see picture after picture passing across the screen of memory.  There is Henry Blake giving his time and labor that my house may be warm and weather proof; there is Mary Blake with daily gifts of good things to eat and counsel for my inexperience.  I see the little fishing boats bobbing against the rocks as the men stop at the island to throw me off a bass and some silver herring as they pass with the day’s catch.  There are John Beaulac’s two little girls scrambling through the bushes to bring me some venison when father has killed a deer, and I see Anna Jackson putting a big jug of maple syrup in the sleigh that brings me home on a Sunday.

I see too Granny Drapeau’s earnest old face, as I hear her say:

“Eh, but I was feared for you last night, when the wind blowed so strong.  I couldn’t sleep fer thinkin’ of you, all alone on that island.  Come daylight I says to Andy, ‘Look over an’ tell if you kin see her smoke.’  For if ever that smoke is not a’risin’ I’ll send one of the men over to see what’s wrong.”

Daily kindnesses, daily acts of friendliness for the stranger woman, who came from nowhere, to stay awhile and will go away, they know not where.

CHAPTER X

January the twenty-second was a great day in the county.  It was the date of the “Tea Meeting,” given under the auspices of the English Church, for the benefit of the destitute Belgians.  It was also a great day for me, being the first and the last time that I shall appear in Many Islands’ society, when society meets at night.  To drive seven miles in the bitter cold, to return to a stone cold house in the middle of the night, requires a love of foregathering with one’s fellows that I do not possess.  So not until I have trained the rabbit to keep up the fire shall I venture out at night again.  I had been invited to the festivity by Mrs. Jackson weeks before.  Having very little notion of the proper dress for such an occasion, I ventured to ask counsel of a young visitor who dropped in opportunely.

“What do the women wear to the Tea Meetings here?” I inquired.

She surveyed me with an appraising eye.  “Well now,” she said, kindly, “haven’t you a nice, dark waist here with you?  A lady of your age would naturally wear something dark and plain.”

At once I cast away all idea of a serviceably plain attire and determined to array myself in all the finery I had with me here; chiffon gown, long gloves and velvet hat with plumes.  “Lady of my age, indeed!”

And when I arrived at the entertainment every soul was in her best, and my attire entirely appropriate.  I waited with some pleasant anticipation for the moment when my little friend should spy me and was not disappointed in the expression that swept across her pretty face.  As a plain dresser I was evidently not a success.

The start was to be an early one.  In the middle of the afternoon I raked out the fire, fed the animals, hid the key under the woodpile and started down the lake to the Jackson farm, following a fresh-cut sleigh track that glittered like a silver ribbon flung down on the blue ice.  Now and again the solid floor under me would give a groan and a heave and I would spring aside, my heart in my throat despite my knowledge of the two feet of solid ice beneath me.  Then I would assure my quaking spirit that where the woodsleds could drive I could surely walk, and would travel on.

At Jackson’s there was a pot of bean soup on the stove, and, as a comforting repast on a cold day, I know of nothing that approaches hot bean soup—it stays by one.  We drove off in the big farm sleigh, seven miles to the town of Fallen Timber, passing through Sark with its five houses and the Cheese Factory, and by farms each of which contributed its heavily laden sleigh to the long line of vehicles bound for the meeting.

The town hall of Fallen Timber stands on a bleak hillside.  It is a room, about thirty by forty feet in size, with a six-foot wide stage at the end and a box stove in the middle.  The stovepipe goes straight to the ceiling, across, and out by a hole in the wall at the back of the stage.  The walls are of a dirty, leprous-looking plaster, with here and there a small bunch of ground pine tacked on by way of decoration.  At the back of the stage a strip of once white muslin bore the inscription: “Welcome To All” in letters a foot high.

The seats are planks laid on the stumps of trees, the stage curtain is of red and green calico.

Now and again this curtain was pushed aside, disclosing the preparations for supper, and such piles of cookies, cakes, and sandwiches I never expect to see again.  In the phrase of this neighborhood there were certainly “plenty of cookings.”

The great folk of the evening were late—the rector and his wife, the member of Parliament, who was to preside for us, and the orator, who was to address us.  But we did not mind the delay.  We had come to meet each other, and the time passed pleasantly enough.  I was seated almost exactly on the stove, ventilation there was none, and the hall was packed, but what of that?  It was good to feel thoroughly warm, at no expense to oneself, and there’s too much fuss made about fresh air anyway—at least in the opinion of many of my neighbors.

The orator was the typical political speaker—portly, bland, slightly humorous and very approachable.  He made an excellent speech, outlining the causes that led to the Great War, and telling of Germany’s policy and her hopes.  He explained the part that Belgium had played, in holding back the tide of invasion until France had had time to mobilize, and it was all very clear and convincing.  He laid stress on the spontaneous outpouring of loyalty in the colonies, and quoted one of the first messages received from India—the telegram from a Rajah that read: “My Emperor, what work has he for ME and for my-people?”

As he went on to enumerate them—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and all the islands of the seas—I forgot the little hall, the crowd, the heat, and caught something of Isaiah’s vision of the Great House of God, that shall be exalted high above the hills, and of the time when all nations shall flow unto it.

After the speech came supper, huge plates of sandwiches and many kinds of cake, with pitchers of steaming tea.  The men ate three and four of these platefuls with as careless an air as who should say: “What are five pounds or so of food washed down with quarts of strong, boiled tea?  A mere nothing.”

What was worse, the children ate quite as much as their elders, but I have long since ceased to forebode anything for the youth of this favored land.  Apparently, they cannot be harmed.

After supper, at about eleven-thirty, came the real object of the meeting—the entertainment by “local talent.”  It began with the chorus: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.”  Followed then a recitation, “My Aunt Somebody’s Custard Pie.”

This was delivered in a coquettish, not to say soubrettish manner by a little miss in a short white frock, and with a coral ribbon wound round her curly, dark hair.  Her assured manner struck me and not pleasantly.  Later I understood it.  She was “Teacher” in charge of Number Six, better known as the Woodchuck School.  I am told that the Boards of Education cannot keep these rural schools supplied, the girls marry off so fast; and I can well believe it, judging by this one.  She was evidently the belle of the neighborhood.  In the comments that the boys were making all round me the other girls were all very well, but “Teacher” was easily the favorite.

“She’s a good teacher,” I heard one declare, hoarsely fervent.  “She’s did well by Number Six.  I could make out every word them children spoke”—a fact that really seemed to give him cause for satisfaction.

The night wore on with drill after drill, song after song, recitation after recitation.  Despite my fatigue, I was interested.  As I watched the audience something took me by the throat.  It was somehow so pathetic.  Those heavy men, those work-worn women were not interested because their children were being shown off.  No indeed.  They liked the performance because it was just at their level, and that fact threw a searchlight on the bare monotony of their lives.  We finished at about two o’clock with “Tipperary,” and “God Save the King,” and, as every national anthem is an assault on the feelings and makes me cry, I sang and wiped my eyes with the rest.

The night skies here are seldom black, like the skies of the south, they are more often a soft, misty gray.  The stars, instead of being sharp little points of light, are big and indistinct and furry.  It is always light enough to see the road, even at the dark of the moon.  We drove along through the bitter cold, Big John Beaulac’s hired boy, Reginald, standing in the back of the sleigh, by way of getting a lift home.  He was regretting, all the way, that some people had not eaten all their “cookings” and that so much good food had been wasted on the floor.  I fancied that Reginald Bean would fain have eaten even more than he did.

At the shore we dropped Mrs. Jackson and the three little sleeping Jacksons, and drove on down the lake.  At the narrows I, being almost frozen to the seat of the sleigh, insisted on being set down to walk, and took my way along the side of the island, treading in the footprints that I had left in the snow when I had set out—was it the day or the week before?

I groped my way among the trees and along the trail to the house, lighted a fire and looked at the clock.  I had been walking through the woods at four o’clock in the morning, and with as little concern as though it had been that hour of a summer afternoon.

Then, as though to rebuke my temerity, I was frightened on the lake the very next day.

I was walking briskly along on the ice, singing at the top of my lungs, because just to be alive on a day when the air was so cold and clean, the sky so blue and the snow crystals so brilliant, was happiness, when I came full on a figure that robbed the morning of its joy.

It was Ishmael Beaulac, the imbecile, shambling heavily along.  He spoke, then turned and followed me some distance, his air half menacing, half cringing, and I was frightened, for I realized that for miles around there was no one to come to my aid, if Ishmael should take it into his poor, crazed brain to do me harm.  But he wandered off again, and, as I watched his bent figure shuffling away in the snow, I was shaken with a great compassion.  I have never seen a face so marked with evil.  Lined, swollen, and inflamed with some loathsome eruption, the low, receding forehead, with coarse, black hair growing almost to the line of the eyebrows, a wide, loose-lipped mouth, and cunning shifty eyes—it is a face that has haunted my dreams.

I asked Rose Beaulac about him.

“John and I was a sayin’ that we’d ought to tell you about Ish,” she said.  “Now that the ice is come, likely he’ll walk over to the island.  But don’t you be afeared of him.  Just make out like you’re goin’ to throw hot water on him an’ he’ll run.”

“Oh, poor creature!” I cried.  “I couldn’t hurt him.”

“It ain’t needful to scald him,” said Rose, with an air of great cunning.  “I always holds my finger in the water to see if it’s cool enough afore I throws it.  He’s awful ’fraid of water, Ish is,” she observed, and remembering Ishmael’s appearance I could well believe it.

“But don’t you ever make over him,” Rose went on, “and don’t you ever feed him or you’ll have him there all the time.  Don’t leave any knives or old boots around where he can git them.  Ish don’t know nothin’ about money; he’ll walk right past your purse to steal a pair of old boots.  But he won’t hurt you—at least we don’t think he will.”

“I have heard that his father, Old John, was cruel to him,” I ventured, with some diffidence, for Old John or Devil Beaulac was Little John’s own Uncle.

A look of distress flitted across Rose’s face.

“Old John was a very severe man, very severe,” she said.  “He treated Ishmael awful bad.  He must have hurted him very hard, for now when the men is teasin’ him if one of them lifts an ax or a spade, and makes to run at him, Ish goes perfectly wild.  They say Old John used to hit him on the head.  That would make him so crazy-like, wouldn’t it?  Yes, poor Ish has had it awful hard, there’s none but will tell you that,” she sighed.

The neighbors are less reticent about old John.  By their account he was a man outside all law, a giant in strength and of a fiendish cruelty.  Finally his tyrannies grew intolerable, and his sons set on him, beating him until he died.  Then they threw his body into an old mica pit, filled the pit with stones and went their way.  No one interfered.  The old man was thought to have earned his doom and the sons were never brought to trial.  But even now, when poor Ishmael’s fits of madness come upon him they say he goes to that pit and throws great rocks into it, cursing the memory of his father.

Much of this may be untrue, but the story haunts me.  In the figure of this poor maniac, hurling his stones and shouting impotent curses to the unheeding sky, I see a time when the earth was young, when men dragged the offender out from the great congregation and stoned him to death before the face of an angry God.  I marvel that in this place so near to civilization such stories can still be told.

CHAPTER XI

We are no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit and I.  We have come through a blizzard.  For the better part of a week we have been “denned in” along with the squirrels, chipmunks, coons, bobcats, and bears.  We have melted snow for drinking water, because the drifts cut us off from the lake and buried the waterhole.  We have dug our firewood out from under a pile of wet whiteness.  The mouse came through safely too, although the snow sifted in through the window screen, and covered him, house and all.

The storm began on the second of February, in the evening.  All night long the wind howled with a violence that threatened to lift the house bodily and deposit it out on the lake.  It searched out every crack and crevice, chilling me to the bone.  It wrenched and tore at the heavy wooden shutters, it tossed and twisted the trees, every now and again throwing one to the ground with a grinding crash.  It whistled, it moaned; and, with it came the snow, in blinding, whirling gray clouds that blotted out everything.  The lake was obscured, the outlines of the neighboring islands were lost.  I could see only a smother of drifting, dancing flakes.

The day passed fairly well, for the mere necessity of keeping up the fire was an occupation in itself.

“This,” said I to Peter, “is the beginning of the true Canadian winter.  I hope it does not stay too long.”

Peter, having been born last summer, has had no experience of any other winter.  No memories of former blizzards troubled him.  He hoped that the bread would hold out.

At about three o’clock in the afternoon Satan inspired me to go out on the porch, to survey the prospect.  Immediately I smelled smoke.

Now, there is but one thing of which I have been afraid, and that is fire.  A blaze started here would inevitably sweep the island and no one could stop it.  I smelled tar paper burning.

“What a pleasant thing it would be to borrow the cherished summer camp of a friend and burn it down for her!  What a safe thing for oneself it would be to go to sleep in a smoldering house and have it break into flames in the night.”

I sniffed and sniffed despairingly.  I scrambled out into the snow to examine the chimneys; I burrowed under the porch floor to look at the foundations; I climbed the ladder to make sure of the roof, and still that smell of burning tar persisted.  I had a horrible misgiving that there was fire smoldering between the outer and the inner walls.

There was nothing for it but to get to the Blakes and tell them of my fears.  If Henry could assure me that there was no way of a fire’s starting, I would believe him and go to bed content.  If I had not that assurance, I should be forced to sit up all night waiting to escape into the snow.  Whatever the weather I had to get to the farm; that was all I could think of.

I dressed as warmly as I could and set forth, through the drifts, to the edge of the island.  I made fair progress until I stepped off the land on to the lake.  Then I began to have some idea of what I, in my ignorance, had undertaken.

The lake was like the ocean done in snow.  The wind had piled great breakers of snow one behind another, their crests curled over at the top, exactly like the waves on a beach.  Only these breakers were curled over the opposite way.  They turned over toward the wind, not away from it.  One long ridge followed another with a deep, scooped out furrow to windward.  Looking down on the lake from the level of the porch, these waves did not look very high.  When I stepped off into them they came up to my armpits.

Even then I had not sense to turn back; even then I had no idea of any real danger.  The wind was at my back.  I could feel it behind me like a wall, as I climbed through each succeeding hillock of snow and out across the intervening three or four yards of level ice.  Wave followed wave, each higher, deeper, more suffocating than the last.  Sometimes I could walk for a few feet on the top of a drift before sinking into its depths.  I scrambled, fell, rolled, crawled, climbed, and thought that I should never reach the shore.  Counting helped me, as I pulled each foot up out of the clinging mass and set it down a few inches nearer the land.

“One, two, three, four,” I said aloud, timing my steps to the pounding of my laboring heart.  My breath was coming in gasps, a pulse beat in my temples, my head swam, there was a ringing in my ears as I plodded on, now with eyes shut.

A thin, washed out moon came out and looked through wisps of ragged clouds.  Its light served only to make the scene more desolate, the distance from the shore more terrifying.  The only idea that remained in my stupified brain was that I must somehow find strength to go on lifting heavy feet one after the other; that I must struggle up from each fall, must breathe deep and keep a quiet mind.

At last I reached the deeper drifts that fringed the shore, skirted the hidden waterhole, found traces of the cattle tracks, dragged myself along the path and finally stepped, with the very last remnant of strength, up on the porch and into the warm bright kitchen.  When Mary Blake caught sight of me, she sat down suddenly and said: “My God!”

They had not attempted to get to the water hole that day, but had given the cattle melted snow.  They had gone only as far as the barn and henhouses.  Even the house dog had stayed indoors.

I gasped out my fears and Henry Blake laughed at them.  There was no way, he said, for a fire to have started and if one had caught, the house would have been flat to the ground long before I had crossed the lake.

I heard him with disgust.  If that was the way my panic looked, it was high time for me to return to my home on the island.  I rose with much dignity and walked off to the shore, before the Blakes had adjusted their minds to the move.

This time the wind was in my face, making the going ten times harder than before.  About forty yards out from shore I stopped and turned my back to the blast to catch my breath, and there was Henry, dressed in his great fur coat, striding out after me and looking for all the world like a bear on its hind legs.

When I saw his thickset figure struggling against the gale it seemed suddenly a hatefully inconsiderate thing to have brought him away from his warm fire and out into the storm and I called:

“Go back, Mr. Blake.  There is no fire.  Don’t attempt to come after me.”

But Henry only stumped on.

“I know there’s nothing burning,” he retorted.  “We’re a long way more worried about you than we are about the camp.  You might get confused and lose your life in this storm.”

On he went ahead of me and I was thankful to follow humbly in his footsteps.

We reached the house, and, as we stood in the warm room fighting for breath, I said:

“Mr. Blake, there is some Scotch here.  Will you drink some?” And Henry said he would.

After that I was content to stay indoors until he came with the horses and broke the tracks through the island.

Such heaps of snow lay piled on the lake and in the woods that it should have taken months for it to disappear; but in three days there came a thaw and melted it all away.

The thaw came not a day too soon, for the sixteenth was the time set for the long anticipated sawing bee at the farm.  During January Henry Blake and Jimmie had been felling trees and dragging them to the house in preparation for the arrival of the perambulating sawmill, that goes from farm to farm as soon as the ice will hold.  There was a pile of logs, ten feet high by thirty feet long piled butt end to in the dooryard.  When a farmer announces a bee his neighbors gather from far and near, leaving their own work to help him put through the particular job in hand.  He is expected to attend their bees in return.  The farmer’s wife, who earns a high seat in heaven if ever woman did, works for days beforehand, cooking for the ten or a dozen hungry men who will come down on her for dinner, supper and, perhaps, breakfast, with a night’s lodging thrown in.

Mary Blake had made bread of the lightest and finest, had killed chickens, taken fish out of brine, and pork from the barrel; had made cakes and pies; had brought out pickles and preserves, and when I arrived she was creaming carrots and onions and boiling the inevitable potatoes.

It was a cold, gray day, with the surface of the lake awash.  As I splashed my way through the water, ankle-deep on the ice, I heard the saw, clear and high, like the note of a violin.  There were ten men working at the bee.  The little gasoline engine was drawn up on a bobsled at the kitchen door, and even as early as ten o’clock it had eaten out a big hole in the side of the stack of logs.  William Foret and Jock McDougal were at the machine shoveling snow into the boiler, William in a bright blue jersey and with a squirrel skin cap set at an angle over his dark, eager face.  Henry Blake was at the wheel, to take the sawed-off chunks from the feeders and throw them to the pile.  The rhythm of his movements was exact.  A reach toward the wheel, a heave, a toss over his shoulder to the ever-increasing pile of chunks and a return to the wheel—all this at the rate of a chunk every three seconds.  This position, being the hardest work, is always taken by the host at a bee.

Little John Beaulac, Tom Jackson and Uncle Dan Cassidy lifted the logs and carried them to the saw, where Black Jack held them against the blade.  There were two or three extra men standing ready to take up the work when one or more should be exhausted.

In the midst of the fray a sleigh was sighted, far out on the ice.  It was bringing Jim McNally from far back of the mica mine.  He had heard of the bee and had come, at a venture, for fear that Henry might be “shorthanded.”  He brought a pail of fresh eggs for Mary Blake and a great sack of turnips.  There was a mighty skurry and mystery about slipping a bag of salt fish under the seat of the sleigh, for him to find when he reached home.

At half past eleven the men trooped in to dinner, with many facetious remarks about the strength of their appetites and the advisability of letting the dirtiest man wash first.

After a very short smoke time they were at work again and I sat at the kitchen window, watching the saw bite through the big logs.  The men’s rhythmic movements, the swift interplay of the bright colors of their jerseys, the long scream of the toothed blade, all lulled me to vacuity of mind.  Long after dark, when I was back at home, I could hear the sound of the wheel coming across the lake.  That song of the saw tells me just where the mill is working for the day.  Going out on the porch I can tell whether the bee is at Blake’s, Drapeau’s, Foret’s or the mines.

The Blakes are very up to date in their use of the gasoline engine.  Many of the farmers still use the old treadmill, where four teams of horses walk round and round all day, turning the wheel.  Invited to a bee at the Jacksons’, the other day, I took a camera along, for a picture of the old tread will soon be a treasured possession.  The men had paused in their work in the kindest way to allow themselves to be “took.”  I was walking, with great dignity, down the slippery hillside, when a treacherous bit of ice was my undoing.  I fell and my demoralization was complete.

Camera flew one way, walking staff another, arms and legs spread out to the four points of the compass, as I went shooting down that hill.  When I had gathered my scattered members and my wits together, and was scrambling up with the foolish grin of the newly fallen, I looked appealingly at the sawing gang, expecting to hear the inevitable laugh.  Not a face did I see.  Every man’s back was turned.  The picture was taken amid a sounding silence.

Commenting on that display of good manners to Uncle Dan, I said fervently: “Never in my life did I see such perfect breeding.  It is almost impossible to help laughing when anyone falls, but not one of those men smiled.  I never expected such politeness.”

Uncle Dan’s Irish eyes twinkled.

“You’d ought to have heard what the b’ys said when you left,” he observed.

Pondering that cryptic remark, I am inclined to think that it is just as well that I do not know all that is being said of me in the work gangs and around the kitchen fires of Many Islands.