A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

BETHESDA

If anything was missing at the old farmhouse—clothes-brush, soap, comb or other articles of daily use—some one almost always would exclaim, "Look in Bethesda!" or "I left it in Bethesda!" Bethesda was one of those household words that you use without thought of its original significance or of the amused query that it raises in the minds of strangers.

Like most New England houses built seventy-five years ago, the farmhouse at the old Squire's had been planned without thought of bathing facilities. The family washtub, brought to the kitchen of a Saturday night, and filled with well water tempered slightly by a few quarts from the teakettle, served the purpose. We were not so badly off as our ancestors had been, however, for in 1865, when we young folks went home to live at the old Squire's, stoves were fully in vogue and farmhouses were comfortably warmed. Bathing on winter nights was uncomfortable enough, we thought, but it was not the desperately chilly business that it must have been when farmhouses were heated by a single fireplace.

In the sitting-room we had both a fireplace and an "air-tight" for the coldest weather. In grandmother Ruth's room there was a "fireside companion," and in the front room a "soapstone comfort," with sides and top of a certain kind of variegated limestone that held heat through the winter nights.

So much heat rose from the lower rooms that the bedrooms on the floor above, where we young folks slept, were by no means uncomfortably cold, even in zero weather. Grandmother Ruth would open the hall doors an hour before it was time for us to go to bed, to let the superfluous heat rise for our benefit.

In the matter of bathing, however, a great deal was left to be desired at the old house. There were six of us to take turns at that one tub. Grandmother Ruth took charge: she saw to it that we did not take too long, and listened to the tearful complaints about the coldness of the water. On Saturday nights her lot was not a happy one. She used to sit just outside the kitchen door and call our names when our turns came; and as each of us went by she would hand us our change of underclothing.

Although the brass kettle was kept heating on the stove all the while, we had trouble in getting enough warm water to "take the chill off." More than once—unbeknown to grandmother Ruth—I followed Addison in the tub without changing the water. He had appreciably warmed it up. One night Halstead twitted me about it at the supper table, and I recollect that the lack of proper sensibility that I had shown scandalized the entire family.

"Oh, Joseph!" grandmother often exclaimed to the old Squire. "We must have some better way for these children to bathe. They are getting older and larger, and I certainly cannot manage it much longer."

Things went on in that way for the first two years of our sojourn at the old place—until after the old Squire had installed a hydraulic ram down at the brook, which forced plenty of water up to the house and the barns. Then, in October of the third year, the old gentleman bestirred himself.

He had been as anxious as any one to improve our bathing facilities, but it is not an easy job to add a bathroom to a farmhouse. He walked about at the back of the house for hours, and made several excursions to a hollow at a distance in the rear of the place, and also climbed to the attic, all the while whistling softly: