not come out and play.

Yet the season was not without its compensations. Stores of every kind
were laid in to last through the winter. One might have thought that a
severance of communications with the outside world was feared. Keith
marvelled at the magnificence of it, and once in a while he asked why it
had to be done. The answers were unsatisfactory. The main reason was
that it had always been done, but he gathered also that, while it was
perfectly respectable to live from day to day during the summer, to do
so during the winter would be a distinct proof of social and economic
inferiority.

The fire wood came first--a mighty load of birch logs piled along the
house front in the lane. Two men were busy all day with saw and ax,
reducing those logs into pieces matching the fire-places in the kitchen
stove and the two glazed brick ovens in the living-room and the parlour.
Two more men piled the pieces into huge sacks and staggered with those
on their backs up the five flights of stairs to the top garret under the
peak of the house, which belonged to the Wellanders.

Keith would stand in the kitchen door watching them. First he heard the
slow clamp-clamp of ascending foot-steps. Then the man's heavy breathing
became audible, and Keith felt as if the load was resting on his own
shoulders. Finally the open top of the bag, with its bright stuffing of
newly cut birch wood, showed at the corner of the landing quite a long
time before the head beneath it came into sight. As the man crossed the
landing in front of Keith, bent almost double under his burden, a dew of
pungent perspiration would drop on the slate-coloured stones, leaving
behind a curious path of round spots. Not a word was said at that time,
but coming down the men would sometimes throw a crude jest to the