slate; but whatever he was doing, he was the only one who could always be interrupted.  It was he who must snuff the candles, and put on a stick of wood, and toast the cheese, and turn the apples, and crack the nuts.  He knew where the fox-and-geese board was, and he could find the twelve-men-Morris.  Considering that he was expected to go to bed at eight o’clock, one would say that the opportunity for study was not great, and that his reading was rather interrupted.  There seemed to be always something for him to do, even when all the rest of the family came as near being idle as is ever possible in a New England household.

No wonder that John was not sleepy at eight o’clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire.  He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter.  Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber?  Why did n’t the people who were sleepy go to bed?

How lonesome the old house was; how cold it was, away from that great central fire in the heart of it; how its timbers creaked as if in the contracting pinch of the frost; what a rattling there was of windows, what a concerted attack upon the clapboards; how the floors squeaked, and what gusts from round corners came to snatch the feeble flame of the candle from the boy’s hand.  How he shivered, as he paused at the staircase window to look out upon the great fields of snow, upon the stripped forest, through which he could hear the wind raving in a kind of fury, and up at the black flying clouds, amid which the young moon was dashing and driven on like a frail shallop at sea.  And his teeth chattered more than ever when he got into the icy sheets, and drew himself up into a ball in his flannel nightgown, like a fox in his hole.

For a little time he could hear the noises downstairs, and an occasional laugh; he could guess that now they were having cider, and now apples were going round; and he could feel the wind tugging at the house, even sometimes shaking the bed.  But this did not last long.  He soon went away into a country he always delighted to be in:  a calm place where the wind never blew, and no one dictated the time of going to bed to any one else.  I like to think of him sleeping there, in such rude surroundings, ingenious, innocent, mischievous, with no thought of the buffeting he is to get from a world that has a good many worse places for a boy than the hearth of an old farmhouse, and the sweet, though undemonstrative, affection of its family life.