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She, too, had smooth black hair, but her dark eyes were illumined by no steadfast glow; they snapped and shone with alert intelligence, and her great forehead dominated the rest of her face, scarred with a thousand wrinkles by intensity of nature rather than by time. A pleasant warmth had diffused itself over the room, so cold during the morning service that foot-stoves had been in requisition.

There was no stove in the building, as every one knows. Some of the women had hot bricks and little foot-stoves, and that was all. Ann did not care for either. She sat up straight in the comfortless, high-backed pew. Her cheeks were as red as her crimson cloak, her black eyes shone like stars. She let Mrs. Polly and Nabby have the hot stones, but her own agile little feet were as warm as toast.

Louis demanded a week longer in time than we now spend in going from Boston to Egypt when no telegraph existed when letter postage was twenty-five cents and the postal service extremely primitive when no house was comfortably warmed and women carried foot-stoves to unheated churches when candles and oil lamps were the only means of "lighting up," and we went about the streets at night with dim lanterns when women spun and wove and sewed with their hands only, and all they accomplished was done at the hardest when in our country a young girl might almost as reasonably attempt to reach the moon as to become an artist remembering all this it seems as if an army of magicians must incessantly have waved their wands above us, and that human brains and hands could not have invented and put in operation the innumerable changes in our daily life during the last half-century.

For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be thrust out into the snow to freeze to death. But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were not always allowed.

She, too, had smooth black hair, but her dark eyes were illumined by no steadfast glow; they snapped and shone with alert intelligence, and her great forehead dominated the rest of her face, scarred with a thousand wrinkles by intensity of nature rather than by time. A pleasant warmth had diffused itself over the room, so cold during the morning service that foot-stoves had been in requisition.

So, when the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero on the Johnstown Hills, four hundred feet above the Mohawk Valley, we trudged along through the snow, foot-stoves in hand, to the cold hospitalities of the "Lord's House," there to be chilled to the very core by listening to sermons on "predestination," "justification by faith," and "eternal damnation."

These foot-warmers helped to make endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers. Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings.

The sermons were often two hours long, and by the time they were ended the faithful listeners well deserved the nickname of "blue-skins" which the scoffers gave to them. A few of the wealthier women carried "foot-stoves" from their homes to their pews. A "foot-stove" was simply a square tin box in a wooden frame, with perforations in the sides.

In this condition, the wreck was overtaken by a downward bound sloop, the men of which saved the sleigh, harness, skins, foot-stoves, and such other articles as would not float away. Our adventure made a good deal of noise in the circle of Albany; and I have reason to think that my own conduct was approved by those who heard of it.

Dean was one of those exasperating women who pervade their mansions like a domestic steam-engine one week and take to their sofas the next, absorbed by fidgets and foot-stoves, shawls and lamentations. There were three riotous and robust young brothers, whom it is unnecessary to describe except by stating that they were boys in the broadest sense of that delightful word.