“Oh, Mrs. Hogan!” cried Dorothy, “let Celia sleep down here with me. Your bed is big enough for two, surely.”
“Well, I dunno——”
“Then she will be right on hand to light the fire in the morning,” suggested Dorothy, who could not think calmly of the little girl getting up in the cold to come downstairs and light a fire for her. “And I’d love to have her sleep with me. She’d be company.”
“Well, if ye wish it,” said the woman, slowly. “But mind ye, Cely! if ye’re not a good gur-rl—an’ kick an’ thrash in yer sleep—I’ll certainly spank ye. Now, mind that!”
The woman got up and went through the hall to open the guest chamber. The room was like a refrigerator, and the cold air swept out of it into the kitchen and made Dorothy and Celia “hug the stove.” It was a bitter cold night and Dorothy secretly longed for her own warm room, with Tavia, at Glenwood Hall.
But Celia was delighted at the permission given her. She wriggled out of Dorothy’s arms and ran upstairs for her nightie. Mrs. Hogan brought forth one of her own sleeping garments for Dorothy—voluminous enough, it seemed to the girl, to be used as a tent if one wished to go camping out.
The nightgown was of coarse muslin, but as white as it could be, and had evidently been folded away in lavender for some special occasion. Mrs. Hogan did not give one the impression of being a lady who paid much attention to the niceties of life.
And there was Celia’s little nightie—a coarse, unbleached cotton garment, with not even a frill of common lace about the throat. When the child got into it and knelt by the kitchen settee to say her prayers, Dorothy thought she looked as though she was dressed in a little meal-sack!
Meanwhile Mrs. Hogan had brought down an old-fashioned brass “bed warmer” from the wall—a long handle, covered pan (the cover being perforated) into which she shoveled some glowing coals from the stove fire-box. With this bed-warmer she ironed the bed in the guest room. These bed-warmers were common enough in the pioneer homes of New England and the upper New York counties, and Dorothy decided that Mrs. Hogan must have found this one in the old farmhouse when she had purchased the place.
“Come on wid ye, now!” the woman called from the cold bed chamber. “Oi’ve taken the desp’rit cold out o’ the shates, and’ yez kin cuddle in here an’ kape war-r-rm. But ye’ll git no sich notion in yer head that I’ll be warmin’ yer bid for yez on other nights, Cely; for I won’t do ut! I never have me own bed warmed, and it’s well fer youse ter l’arn ter live harsh, too.”