CHAPTER XVII
CHRISTMAS NEWS
It bade fair to be an old-fashioned northern New England winter. Janice Day had never seen anything like this in the prairie country from which she had come.
There three or four big storms, the traces of which soon melted, had been considered a "hard" winter. Here in Poketown the hillside was made white before Thanksgiving, and then one snow after another sifted down upon the mountains. Tree branches in the forest broke under the weight of snow. Sometimes she lay awake in the night and heard the frost burst great trees as though a stick of dynamite had been set off inside them.
The lake ice became so thick that the steamboat could no longer make her trips. Walky Dexter became mail carrier and brought the mail from Middletown every other day.
Janice found the time not at all tedious in its flight. There really was so much to do!
As for real fun—winter sports had been little more than a name to the girl from the Middle West before this winter. The boys had got their bob-sleds out before Thanksgiving. Toboggans were not popular in Poketown, for the coasting-places were too rough. At first Janice was really afraid to join the hilarious parties of boys and girls on some of the slides.
Marty, however, owned a big sled, and she did not want her cousin to lose his good opinion of her. He had declared that she was almost as good as a boy, and Janice successfully hid from him her fear of the sport that really is a royal one.
A favorite slide of the Poketown young people was from the head of the street on which Hopewell Drugg's store was located, down the hill, past the decayed dock on which Janice had first seen little Lottie Drugg, and on across the frozen inlet to the wooded point in which Lottie declared the echo dwelt.
When the whole lake froze solidly, the course of the sleds was continued across its level surface as far as the momentum from the hill would carry the bobs. There was skating here, too; and many were the moonlight nights on which a regular carnival was held at the foot of these hilly streets.