"You needn't wait for me to ring the second bell in the morning. You'd a good deal better come right down into the sitting-room, where it's warm."
It had taken three generations of hard-working and well-to-do Farnhams to build all there was of that great, queer, rambling, comfortable old farmhouse. Each owner had added something on one side or the other, or in the rear; so that there was now room enough in it for the largest kind of a family. Porter Hudson now had a good-sized chamber all to himself; but he remarked of it, shortly after he got in,—
"No furnace heaters in this house; of course not: they don't have such things in the country."
No: nor was there any gas, nor hot and cold water; and the furniture was only just as much as was really needed. He had never before slept in a feather-bed; but he was not at all sorry to burrow into one that night, out of the pitilessly frosty air of that chamber.
"How a fellow does go down!" he said to himself; "and it fits all around him. I'll be warm in a minute." And so he was, and with the warmth came the soundest kind of slumber. The Farnhams had kept any number of geese, year after year, in earlier days, and all their feather-beds were uncommonly deep and liberal.
Susie had Pen for a chum, and that was a good reason why neither of them fell asleep right away. It is always a wonder how much talking there is to be done. It is a good thing, too, that so many enterprising people, old and young, are always ready to take up the task of talking it, even if they have to lie awake for a while.
Silence came at last, creeping from room to room; and there is hardly anywhere else such perfect silence to be obtained as can be had in and about a farmhouse away up country, in the dead of winter and the dead of night. It is so still that you can almost hear the starlight crackle on the snow, if there is no wind blowing.
Winter mornings do not anywhere get up as early as men and women are compelled to, but it is more completely so on a farm than in the city. The chamber Porter Hudson slept in was as dark as a pocket when he heard the clang of Penelope's first bell that next morning after his arrival. He sprang out of bed at once, and found his candle, and lighted it to dress by. One glance through the frosty windows told him how little was to be seen at that time of the year and of the day.
In another instant all his thoughts went down stairs ahead of him, and centred themselves upon the great fireplace in the sitting-room. He dressed himself with remarkable quickness, and followed them. He thought that he had never in his life seen a finer-looking fire, the moment he was able to spread his hands in front of it.
Mrs. Farnham was there too, setting the breakfast-table, and smiling on him; and Porter's next idea was, that his aunt was the rosiest, pleasantest, and most comfortable of women.