CHAPTER X.
BETHESDA If anything was missing at the old farmhouse--clothes-brush, soap, comb or other articles of daily use--some one almost always would exclaim, "Look in Bethesda!" or "I left it in Bethesda!" Bethesda was one of those household words that you use without thought of its original significance or of the amused query that it raises in the minds of strangers.
Like most New England houses built seventy-five years ago, the farmhouse at the old Squire's had been planned without thought of bathing facilities.

The family washtub, brought to the kitchen of a Saturday night, and filled with well water tempered slightly by a few quarts from the teakettle, served the purpose.

We were not so badly off as our ancestors had been, however, for in 1865, when we young folks went home to live at the old Squire's, stoves were fully in vogue and farmhouses were comfortably warmed.

Bathing on winter nights was uncomfortable enough, we thought, but it was not the desperately chilly business that it must have been when farmhouses were heated by a single fireplace.
In the sitting-room we had both a fireplace and an "air-tight" for the coldest weather.

In grandmother Ruth's room there was a "fireside companion," and in the front room a "soapstone comfort," with sides and top of a certain kind of variegated limestone that held heat through the winter nights.
So much heat rose from the lower rooms that the bedrooms on the floor above, where we young folks slept, were by no means uncomfortably cold, even in zero weather.