Zoe cooked, and cleaned the rooms.  I was busy with my new dwelling.  I killed enough game to keep us in meat.  Sometimes standing in the doorway I could bring down a deer.  Then we had venison.  But we were never without quail and ducks and geese.  Zoe made the most delicious cornbread, baking it in a pan in the fireplace.  The Engles brought us some cider.  I had bought a fiddle and was learning to play upon it.  We never lacked for diversion.  In the evenings I played, or we read.  My days were full of duties connected with the new house, or the crops and improvements for the next year.  And spring would soon be here.

I was beginning to be looked upon as a driving man.  They had scoffed at me as a young Englishman who could not endure the frontier life, and who knew nothing of farming.  But they saw me take hold with so much vigor and interest that I was soon spoken of as an immediate success.  My coming to the hut and living and doing for myself had helped greatly to confirm me in their esteem.  I saw nothing hazardous or courageous in it.  As for the daily life I could not have been more happily placed.

The fall went by.  The winter descended.  The brook was frozen.  I had to break the ice with the ax to get water.  I had to spend an hour each day cutting wood for the fireplace and bearing it into the hut.  These were the mornings when the cold bath, which I could never forego, no matter what the circumstances were, tested my resolution.  For I was sleeping in the loft where the bitter wind fanned my cheeks during the night.  Zoe had found it too rigorous, and preferred the danger of an intruder to the cold.  Even snow sifted on my face from rifts in the shingles which we had overlooked.  But nevertheless I adhered to the morning lustration, sometimes going to the brook to do it.  I had never experienced such cold.

Yet the months of November and December, which at the time I thought were the extreme of winter weather, were as nothing to the polar blasts that poured down upon us in January and February.  I had no thermometer.  But judging by subsequent observations I am sure that the temperature reached twenty degrees below zero.  I took no baths in the brook now but contented myself with a hurried splash from a pan.  At night I covered myself with all the blankets that I could support.  I protected my face with a woolen cap, which was drawn over the ears as well.  Zoe, though sleeping near the immense fire which we kept well fed with logs, got through but a little better than I. We heated stones in hot water to take to bed with us.  All kinds of wild animals coming forth for food were frozen in their tracks.  I found wolves and foxes in abundance lying stiffened and defeated in the woods.  Some nights, seeing the light of our candle they would howl for food and shelter; and I heard them run up and down past the door, wisping it with their tails.  Then Zoe would cling to me.  And I would take up the rifle in anticipation of the wind opening the door and admitting the marauder.  We were snowbound the whole month of February.  I had to shovel a path to the brook.  But it was out of the question for any one to go to town, or for any one to come to us.  And of course during these bitter days nothing was done on my new house.  The logs were all cut.  They stood piled under the snow, except for a few that had been put in place.