card-parties, sleigh rides and tavern dances, and never such wonderful skating. The river was one gleaming, glittering thoroughfare of ice from Milliken’s Mills to the dam at the Edgewood bridge. At sundown bonfires were built here and there on the mirror like surface, and all the young people from the neighboring villages gathered on the[Pg 91] ice; while detachments of merry, rosy-cheeked boys and girls, those who preferred coasting, met at the top of Brigadier Hill, from which one could get a longer and more perilous slide than from any other point in the township.

[Pg 91]

Claude Merrill, in his occasional visits from Boston, was very much in evidence at the Saturday evening ice parties. He was not an artist at the sport himself, but he was especially proficient in the art of strapping on a lady’s skates, and murmuring—as he adjusted the last buckle,—“The prettiest foot and ankle on the river!” It cannot be denied that this compliment gave secret pleasure to the fair village maidens who received it, but it was a pleasure accompanied by electric shocks of excitement. A girl’s foot might perhaps be mentioned, if a fellow were daring enough, but the line was rigidly drawn at the ankle, which was not a part of the human frame ever alluded to[Pg 92] in the polite society of Edgewood at that time.

[Pg 92]

Rose, in her red linsey-woolsey dress and her squirrel furs and cap, was the life of every gathering, and when Stephen took her hand and they glided up stream, alone together in the crowd, he used to wish that they might skate on and on up the crystal ice-path of the river, to the moon itself, whither it seemed to lead them.

[Pg 93]

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

But the Saco all this time was meditating of its surprises. The snapping cold weather and the depth to which the water was frozen were aiding it in its preparation for the greatest event of the season. On a certain gray Saturday in March, after a week of mild temperature, it began to rain as if, after months of snowing, it really enjoyed a new form of entertainment. Sunday dawned with the very flood-gates of heaven opening, so it seemed. All day long the river was rising under its miles of unbroken ice, rising at the threatening rate of four inches an hour.

Edgewood went to bed as usual that night, for the bridge at that point was set too high 

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