WHITE MONKEY WEEK Cutting and drawing the year's supply of firewood to the door occupied us for a week; and following this we boys had planned to take matters easy awhile, for the old Squire was to be away from home.

Asa Doane had left us, too, for a visit to his folks.

As it chanced, however, a strenuous emergency arose.
A year previously the old Squire had made an agreement with a New York factory, to furnish dowels and strips of clear white birch wood, for piano keys and _passementerie_.
At that time _passementerie_ was coming into use for ladies' dresses.
The fine white-birch dowels were first turned round on small lathes and afterwards into little bugle and bottle-shaped ornaments, then dyed a glistening black and strung on linen threads.
On our own forest lots we had no birch which quite met the requirements.
But another lumberman, an acquaintance of the old Squire's, named John Lurvey (a brother of old Zachary Lurvey), who owned lots north of ours, had just what we needed to fill the order.
Lumbermen are often "neighborly" with each other in such matters, and with John Lurvey the old Squire made a kind of running contract for three hundred cords of white-birch "bolts" from a lakeside lot.

Each one made a memorandum of the agreement in his pocket note-book; and as each trusted the other, nothing more exact or formal was thought necessary.
The white birch was known to be valuable lumber.

We were to pay two thousand dollars for it on the stump,--one thousand down,--and have two "winters" in which to get it off and pay the balance of the money.