Her
heart yearned for all the dumb creatures about the place,
intervening between them and her father's scanty care; and when
the thermometer descended far below zero she would be found
stuffing hay into the holes and cracks of the barn and hen-house,
giving the horse and cow fresh beddings of straw and a mouthful
of extra food between the slender meals provided by the Deacon.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon and a fire in the Baxters'
kitchen since six in the morning had produced a fairly temperate
climate in that one room, though the entries and chambers might
have been used for refrigerators, as the Deacon was as
parsimonious in the use of fuel as in all other things, and if
his daughters had not been hardy young creatures, trained from
their very birth to discomforts and exposures of every sort, they
would have died long ago.
The Baxter kitchen and glittered in all its accustomed
cleanliness and order. Scrubbing and polishing were cheap
amusements, and nobody grudged them to Waitstill. No tables in
Riverboro were whiter, no tins more lustrous, no pewter brighter,
no brick hearths ruddier than hers. The beans and brown bread and
Indian pudding were basking in the warmth of the old brick oven,
and what with the crackle and sparkle of the fire, the gleam of
the blue willow-ware on the cupboard shelves, and the scarlet
geraniums blooming on the sunny shelf above the sink, there were
few pleasanter place to be found in the village than that same
Baxter kitchen.
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