“Five months,” said I to myself,—­“five months!”

“What in time’s the matter with you, Hollis?” says Bob Stokes, with a great slap on my arm; “you’re giving that ’ere ox molasses on his hay!”

Sure enough I was, and he said I acted like a dazed creatur, and very likely I did.  But I couldn’t have told Bob the reason.  You see, I knew Nancy was just drawing up her little rocking-chair—­the one with the red cushion—­close by the fire, sitting there with the children to wait for the tea to boil.  And I knew—­I couldn’t help knowing, if I’d tried hard for it—­how she was crying away softly in the dark, so that none of them could see her, to think of the words we’d said, and I gone in without ever making of them up.  I was sorry for them then.  O Johnny, I was sorry, and she was thirty miles away.  I’d got to be sorry five months, thirty miles away, and couldn’t let her know.

The boys said I was poor company that first week, and I shouldn’t wonder if I was.  I couldn’t seem to get over it any way, to think I couldn’t let her know.

If I could have sent her a scrap of a letter, or a message, or something, I should have felt better.  But there wasn’t any chance of that this long time, unless we got out of pork or fodder, and had to send down,—­which we didn’t expect to, for we’d laid in more than usual.

We had two pretty rough weeks’ work to begin with, for the worst storms of the season set in, and kept in, and I never saw their like, before or since.  It seemed as if there’d never be an end to them.  Storm after storm, blow after blow, freeze after freeze; half a day’s sunshine, and then at it again!  We were well tired of it before they stopped; it made the boys homesick.

However, we kept at work pretty brisk,—­lumber-men aren’t the fellows to be put out for a snow-storm,—­cutting and hauling and sawing, out in the sleet and wind.  Bob Stokes froze his left foot that second week, and I was frost-bitten pretty badly myself.  Cullen—­he was the boss—­he was well out of sorts, I tell you, before the sun came out, and cross enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two.

But when the sun is out, it isn’t so bad a kind of life, after all.  At work all day, with a good hot dinner in the middle; then back to the shanties at dark, to as rousing a fire and tiptop swagan as anybody could ask for.  Holt was cook that season, and Holt couldn’t be beaten on his swagan.

Now you don’t mean to say you don’t know what swagan is?  Well, well!  To think of it!  All I have to say is, you don’t know what’s good then.  Beans and pork and bread and molasses,—­that’s swagan,—­all stirred up in a great kettle, and boiled together; and I don’t know anything—­not even your mother’s fritters—­I’d give more for a taste of now.  We just about lived on that; there’s nothing you can cut and haul all day on like swagan.  Besides that, we used to have doughnuts,—­you don’t know what doughnuts are here in Massachusetts; as big as a dinner-plate those doughnuts were, and—­well, a little hard, perhaps.  They used to have it about in Bangor that we used them for clock pendulums, but I don’t know about that.