When he had subdued his mirth, he resumed at a point apparently very
remote from that where he had started.
"There was one of those winters in Cambridge, where I lived then, that
seemed tougher than any other we could remember, and they were all
pretty tough winters there in those times. There were forty snowfalls
between Thanksgiving and Fast Day--you don't know what Fast Day is in
New York, and we didn't, either, as far as the fasting went--and the
cold kept on and on till we couldn't, or said we couldn't, stand it any
longer. So, along about the middle of March somewhere, we picked up the
children and started south. In those days New York seemed pretty far
south to us; and when we got here we found everything on wheels that we
had left on runners in Boston. But the next day it began to snow, and we
said we must go a little farther to meet the spring. I don't know
exactly what it was made us pitch on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; but we had
a notion we should find it interesting, and, at any rate, a total change
from our old environment. We had been reading something about the
Moravians, and we knew that it was the capital of Moravianism, with the
largest Moravian congregation in the world; I think it was Longfellow's
'Hymn of the Moravian Nuns' that set us to reading about the sect; and
we had somehow heard that the Sun Inn, at Bethlehem, was the finest
old-fashioned public house anywhere.
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