entirely to the business of digging a hole to store his nuts in for the
ensuing winter.



FIRES IN THE WOODS.

All the large trees that Jonas had felled beyond the brook, he cut up
into lengths, and hauled them up into the yard, and made a great high
wood-pile of them, higher than his head; but all the branches, and the
small bushes, with all the green leaves upon them, lay about the ground
in confusion. Rollo asked him what he was going to do with them. He
said, after they were dry, he should burn them up, and that they would
make a splendid bonfire.

They lay there drying a good many weeks. The leaves turned yellow and
brown, and the little twigs and sticks became gradually dry and brittle.
Rollo used to walk down there often, to see how the drying went on, and
sometimes he would bring up a few of the bushes, and put them on the
kitchen fire, to see whether they were dry enough to burn.

At last, late in the autumn, one cool afternoon, Jonas asked Rollo to go
down with him and help him pile up the bushes in heaps, for he was going
to burn them that evening. Rollo wanted very much that his cousins James
and Lucy should see the fires; and so he asked his mother to let him go
and ask them to come and take tea there that night, and go out with them
in the evening to the burning. She consented, and Rollo went. Lucy
promised to come just before tea-time, and James came then, with Rollo,
to help him pile the bushes up.