MONDAY m everybody got up early, in a hurry to get started to Grandpas. Pa wao be there to help with the work of gathering and boiling the sap. Ma would help Grandma and the aunts make good things to eat for all the people who were ing to the dance.
Breakfast was eaten and the dishes washed and the beds made by lamplight. Pa packed his fiddle carefully in its box and put it in the big sled that was already waiting at the gate.
The air was cold and frosty and the light was gray, when Laura and Mary and Ma with Baby Carrie were tucked in snug and warm uhe robes.
The horses shook their heads and pranced making the sleigh bells ring merrily, and they went on the road through the Big Woods to Grandpas.
The snow was damp and smooth in the road, so the sled slipped quickly over it, and the big trees seemed to be hurrying by oher side.
After awhile there was sunshine in the woods and the air sparkled. The long streaks of yellow, light lay between the shadows of the tree trunks, and the snow was colored faintly pink. All the shadows were thin and blue, and every little curve of snowdrifts and every little tra the snow had a shadow.
Pa showed Laura the tracks of the wild creatures in the snow at the sides of the road. The small, leaping tracks of cottontail rabbits, the tiny tracks of field mice, and the feather-stitg tracks of snowbirds. There were larger tracks, like dogs tracks, where foxes had run, and there were the tracks of a deer that had bounded away into the woods.
The air was growing warmer already and Pa said that the snow wouldnt last long.
It did not seem long until they were sweeping into the clearing at Grandpas house, all the sleigh bells jingling. Grandma came to the door and stood there smiling, calling to them to e in.
She said that Grandpa and Uncle Gee were already at work out in the maple woods. So Pa went to help them, while Laura and Mary and Ma, with Baby Carrie in her arms, went into Grandmas house and took off their s.
Laura loved Grandmas house. It was much larger than their house at home. There was one great big room, and then there was a little room that beloo Uncle Gee, and there was another room for the aunts, Aunt Docia and Aunt Ruby. And then there was the kit with a big cookstove.
It was fun to run the whole length of the big room, from the large fireplace at one end all the way to Grandmas bed, uhe window iher end. The floor was made of wide, thick slabs that Grandpa had hewed from the logs with his ax. The floor was smoothed all over, and scrubbed and white, and the big bed uhe window was soft with feathers.
The day seemed very short while Laura and Mary played in the big room and Ma helped Grandma and the aunts i. The men had taken their dio the maple woods, so for dihey did not set the table, but ate cold venison sandwiches and drank milk. But for supper Grandma made hasty pudding.
She stood by the stove, sifting the yellow eal from her fingers into a kettle of boiling salted water. She stirred the water all the time with a big wooden spoon, and sifted in the meal until the kettle was full of a thick, yellow, bubbling mass. The it on the back of the stove where it would cook slowly.
It smelled good. The whole house smelled good, with the sweet and spicy smells from the kit, and the smell of the hickory logs burning with clear, bright flames in the fireplace, and the smell of a clove-apple beside Grandmas mending basket