A BEAR'S "PIPE" IN WINTER After ice-cutting came wood-cutting.

It was now the latter part of January with weather still unusually cold.

There were about three feet of snow on the ground, crusted over from a thaw which had occurred during the first of the month.

In those days we burned from forty to fifty cords of wood in a year.
There was a wood-lot of a hundred acres along the brook on the east side of the farm, and other forest lots to the north of it.

Only the best old-growth maple, birch and beech were cut for fuel--great trees two and three feet in diameter.
The trunks were cut into eight-foot lengths, rolled on the ox-sleds with levers, and then hauled home to the yard in front of the wood-house, where they lay in four huge piles till March, when all hands turned to, with axes and saws, and worked it up.
It was zero weather that week, but bright and clear, with spicules of frost glistening on every twig; and I recollect how sharply the tree trunks snapped--those frost snaps which make "shaky" lumber in Maine.
Addison, Halstead and I, with one of the old Squire's hired men, Asa Doane, went to the wood-lot at eight o'clock that morning and chopped smartly till near eleven.