Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/100

80 country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way through them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores of nuts for the seeker after treasure.

But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own house could know the meaning of the Philadelphia winter as I knew it in the Convent, half frozen in that airy dormitory of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl and hood through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my shawl at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would wink at through the windy passages. The heating arrangements, somehow, never succeeded in coping with the extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were often most miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder what the pampered school girls of the present generation in the same Convent would say to such discomfort. But it did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the memory, I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and hardier for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold house, the coldest in the world. The old conditions of a hardier life, that either killed or cured, did far more to make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled eugenics ever can.

If I had little of the comfort of the Philadelphia child in the Philadelphia house, I shared with him the outdoor pleasures which winter provided by way of compensation—the country white under snow for weeks and weeks, snowballs to be made and snow houses built, sliding to be