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I assured her that we had neither peat nor woodcutting privileges on the Meadows, and to change the subject asked her if she would not go up and see Irma. "A' in guid time," she said. "I hae a word or two to ask ye first, laddie. No that muckle is to be expected o' a man that wad write to puir Janet Lyon instead o' to me, Duncan MacAlpine!"
But the cold was getting to us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting Cesário, and old Piet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest and could wear bigger men's parkas and overpants over our own. But as long as any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut, we didn't dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we'd all freeze stiff in no time at all.
The stable-servant, who was hanging about, immediately came to him; and there was his father standing, all alone, at the door of the house. It was now ten o'clock, and he had expected that his father would have been away from home, as was his custom at that hour. But the innkeeper's mind was at present too full of trouble to allow of his going off either to the woodcutting or to the farm.
He said he thought his cold would never leave him when he went out woodcutting, for he was a master sawyer, and had to supply wood to the whole parish. He spent his evenings preparing wooden soles for skates, for he knew, he said, that in a few weeks these shoes would be wanted for the amusement of skating. At length the last passenger made her appearance, old Mother DECEMBER, with her fire-stool.
Household drudgery, woodcutting, milking, and gardening soon roughen the hands and dim the outside polish. When the body is wearied with much toil the desire to cultivate the mind, or the cultivation it has already received, is gradually wiped out. Thus it was with my parents. They had dropped from swelldom to peasantism. They were among and of the peasantry.
It swept like a mad thing through the forest, shattering down the dead snags, shaking the snow from the limbs of the spruce, roaring and soughing in the tree tops, and blustering, like an arrogant foe, around the cabin walls. And when Bill went forth for his morning's woodcutting he found that his snowshoes did not break through the crust.
And so we work in the woods, the other man and I, talk of our little affairs, working with heart and soul, and getting on well together. The days passed; already, worse luck, I could see the end of our work ahead, but I had a little hope the Lensmand might find something else for me to do when the woodcutting was finished. Something would surely turn up.
They did not invent the science, or the art of story-telling, or the woodcutting, or the plan of getting books up prettily or, indeed, the notion of instructing the masses at all; but finding these things in the hands of "the world," they have "spoiled the Egyptians," and fancy themselves beating Satan with his own weapons.
The first snow is come; it thaws again at once, but winter is not far off, and we are nearing the end of our woodcutting now at Ovrebo another week or so, perhaps, no more. What then? There was work on the railway line up on the, hills, or perhaps more woodcutting at some other place we might come to. Falkenberg was for trying the railway.
There is really hardly anything I can think of to add to this catalogue, except the agricultural implements, which consist of a wooden spade, a hoe, some sharp stakes to make the drills with, and the machete which is an iron bill-hook, and serves for pruning, woodcutting, and now and then for less peaceful purposes.
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