Little House 09; The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Author:Laura Ingalls Wilder
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 1971-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

∨ The First Four Years ∧

The Third Year

With the coming of cool weather, Laura proposed moving the cook-stove back into the bed-sitting room, and she could not understand why Manly put it off, until one day when he came from town with a hard-coal heater.

It was a beautiful stove, the black iron nicely polished and all the nickel trimmings shining brightly.

Manly explained how buying the stove would be a saving in the end. It would take so little coal to keep it going that even though the price per ton was twelve dollars instead of the soft-coal price of six, the cost would be less. Then there would be a steady, even heat night as well as day. It would keep them from taking cold by being first warm then chilly, as with the cook-stove. The nickel top of the new stove was movable and all the cooking except baking could be done in it. On baking days a fire could be made in the summer kitchen.

Rose was creeping, or rather hitching herself, around on the floor these days, and the floor must be kept warm for her.

Laura felt that they couldn’t afford the beautiful new stove, but that was Manly’s business. She need not bother about it – and he did suffer with the cold. It seemed as though he could never get clothes warm enough. She was knitting him a whole long-sleeved undershirt of fine, soft, Shetland wool yarn for a Christmas surprise.

It was difficult to keep it hidden from him and get it finished, but after Christmas she could knit its mate easily.

Manly wore the new shirt when they drove in the cutter to eat Christmas dinner with the home folks.

It was dark when they started for home again and it had begun to snow. Luckily it was not a blizzard but only a snowstorm and, of course, a wind. Rose was warmly wrapped and sheltered in Laura’s arms, with blankets and robes wrapped around them both and Manly in his fur coat beside them.

The going was slow against the storm in the darkness and after some time Manly stopped the horses. “I believe they’re off the road. They don’t like to face the wind,” he said.

He unwrapped himself from the robes, climbed out of the cutter, and looked closely at the ground, trying to find the tracks of the road, but the snow had covered every sign of it. But finally by scraping away the snow with his feet, he found the wheel tracks of the road underneath and only a little to one side.

So Manly walked the rest of the way, keeping to the road by the faint signs of it that he could find now and then, while all around in the darkness was falling snow and empty open prairie.

They were thankful when they reached home and the warmth of the hard-coal base-burner. And Manly said his new undershirt had proven its worth.

Though the weather was cold, there were no bad blizzards and the winter was slipping by very pleasantly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.