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 cold weather came. Driven in for warmth from the deserted and windswept barnyard, she found little to interest her in the stuffy, overheated kitchen or the bare, cold bedroom that she shared with Cissy. As the days grew colder, the sitting room took the place of the porch. Here a hideous product of modernity known as a "base burner" was pressed into service. It stood on a square of ornamental zinc placed over the rag carpet and kept clean and shiny by Cissy's floor rag. It was covered with knobs and scrolls and glorious with polished nickel. All around its fat belly it had several rows of little mica windows. When a fire was lighted in this gorgeous crematory and fed with a bucket of cannel coal, mined in the neighboring state of West Virginia, it made the room so hot that Judith had to gasp for breath.

As the days grew colder, Uncle Ezra spent more and more of his time sitting silently with his feet on the fender of the majestic base burner.

The afternoons were short now, and it was night long before the chores were done. The last thing at night Judith had to milk the cows, feed the pigs and calves and shut up the chickens. When at last she came in shivering out of the dark and cold, there was no steaming hot coffee waiting to hearten her, no bacon sizzling in the pan, no biscuits fluffy and fragrant from the oven. The deserted kitchen was bleak in its chilly neatness and a leftover meal was coldly set forth on the table in the sitting room: cold vegetables and bacon left from dinner, cold biscuits and corn cakes, cold water and cold skim milk to drink, a cheerless and uninviting spread. This had been Aunt Eppie's custom from the beginning of time, and there was never any breach in its observance. As soon as the great base burner of the sitting room was put into operation, the kitchen fire was allowed to go out immediately after dinner, and it was not lighted again until next morning. Aunt Eppie, in explaining this custom, always made a great deal of the fact that it saved work for Cissy. What of course it did save was fuel. A tiny lamp set in the middle of this chill-inspiring table irritated the eyes with its feeble glare and