A Busy Year at the Old Squires | Page 6

day, did that bitter wind let up.
We would have quit work and waited for calmer weather,--the old
Squire advised us to do so,--but the ice was getting thicker every day.
Every inch added to the thickness made the work of sawing harder--at
two cents a cake. So we stuck to it, and worked away in that cruel
wind.
On Thursday it got so cold that if we stopped the saws even for two
seconds, they froze in hard and fast, and had to be cut out with an ax;
thus two cakes would be spoiled. It was not easy to keep the saws
going fast enough not to catch and freeze in; and the cakes had to be
hauled out the moment they were sawed, or they would freeze on again.
Moreover, the patch of open water that we uncovered froze over in a
few minutes, and had to be cleared a dozen times a day. During those
nights it froze five inches thick, and filled with snowdrift, all of which
had to be cleared out every morning.
Although we had our caps pulled down over our ears and heavy mittens
on, and wore all the clothes we could possibly work in, it yet seemed at
times that freeze we must--especially toward night, when we grew tired
from the hard work of sawing so long and so fast. We became 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°; 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 dairying. But because the old Squire and
others were embarking in that business, Rufus wished to do so, too. He
had no ice-house, but thought he could keep ice buried in sawdust, in
the shade of a large apple-tree near his barn; and I may add here that he
tried it with indifferent success for three years, and that it killed the
apple-tree.
On Saturday of that cold week he came to the lake with his lame old
horse and a rickety sled, and wanted us to cut a hundred cakes of ice for
him. The prospect of our getting