“O dear!” groaned Aunt Stanshy, inwardly.

“We are going to have ice-cream, too, may be.  We couldn’t afford it in summer.”

“Not in summer?  Why, that’s the time when people want it most.”

“But we make ours out of snow, you know, and could only have it in cold weather.”

“Then I hope, for your sake, we may have some snow, and I see that the clouds look like it.  But the weather is getting colder nowadays, and if you have your snow, and so can make your ice-cream, it may be so cold that you will have no customers.”

“We will risk that.  Ice-cream always pays.  Ours does, at any rate.”

“Snow is coming, I guess, for it looks like a change in the weather.”

A change, indeed, was setting in.  The river indicated it.  It was as smooth and glassy as if Aunt Stanshy’s flat iron had been over it and pressed every wrinkle and ripple down.  The air was light.  The smoke from the houses and the steam from the only tug that the commerce of the town could afford to support fell, and fluttered downward in thin veils.  Overhead there was a mass of gray cloud halting directly above the town, and looking too lazy ever to stir again.

“Storm comin’!” declared Simes Badger to all his cronies at Silas Trefethen’s store.  “Wind is sou’ already.”

It did not stay “sou’,” but swung around to the east, then worked into the north-east, and then all through the night the wind was sifting cotton-wool down on all the streets as if carpeting them, on all the roofs as if blanketing them, into all the cracks in the walls of houses and barns as if it would chink them up and make them tight for winter.

Chancing to look out of the window as soon as he was awake the morning after the storm, Charlie shouted,

“Ice-cream!”

“Yes, all you want,” said Aunt Stanshy, who, leaving her coffee-pot, her pan of fried potatoes, and batch of biscuit on the kitchen stove, had mounted the stairs to wake the sleepy Charlie.

“Boys will soon be here to make it.”

“I warrant you!  They will make their ice-cream before shoveling the folks’ paths at home.”

It looked so, for half a dozen boys were out in the yard by eight o’clock, shouting “ice-cream” to Charlie, who had not finished his breakfast.

With the help of Aunt Stanshy’s “essences” enough snow was flavored to meet the demands of customers, who, quickly notified, quickly appeared, bringing the contents of all the nail-boxes at their homes.  Even Aunt Stanshy was prevailed upon to buy a dish, and she consistently paid cash for it.

Her boarder, Will Somers, was induced to promise more extensive patronage.

“Will, we all think you a first-rate feller,” said the artful president; “and just to help us out at the fair, couldn’t you take your meals at our restaurant?  Our mothers say they will cook us things—­steak, you know, and so on.”