TWO OVENS

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 39, 23 December 1893, Page 20

TWO OVENS

How Five Lives Were Saved. There are few children now who know anything 1 of ovens larger than those in the kitchen range. But when Iwas a little child, in my grandfather’s house, my cousin and I used to sit in an oven door and play with onr dolls. All the great old-time mansions had hrick ovens built in the house, just as a bedroom or any other room was built, and there was space in it for several small children. In one of those ovens four little girls once stayed all night. It was more than 100 years ago when there were bears, wolves, and Indians g’oingto and fro over the land where great towns now stand. Mr and Mrs Cowan were forced to spend the night away from home, and little Mollie Cowan, a girl of ten, was left alone to take care of her three sisters. About eight o’clock, just as they were going to bed, Mollie heard footsteps out on the snow. It was bright moonlight, but she dared not look out. She held up her hands to the little girls and shook her head for silence. She stepped to the big oven and the door, and said in a low voice, ‘come to sister!’ The little ones, scared and silent, went to her, one by one ; she swiftly lifted then in. ‘Go back in just as far as you can,’ she bade them. Then Mollie got in herself. The -door shut by means of a bolt, which could be pushed inside or out, and she shoved it in, and then put her finger against the end and hoped she would hold it fast. The Indians came in. Mollie heard their grunts and voices. They walked about the room. They even tried the oven door. When they went out Mollie thought they would burn the house. She listened a long time. Her heart beat very loud, but she felt sure at last that the house was not burning. Then she opened the oven door a little to let in fresh air. But she did not dare to leave the oven, and there the four children stayed all night long, and until their father and mother returned. The Indians had only taken a loaf of bread and a ham.

A great Empress, too, had her life saved by hiding in an oven. When she was a young girl, the Empress Catherine, wife of Peter the Great of Russia, was nothing but a humble peasant girl and a servant. There was a war, and the town in which she lived was taken by soldiers, and Catherine had to flee for her life. She ran into a baker’s shop and begged him to try and save her. The baker put her in his great brick oven and closed the door, and saved her life, and she lived to become the Empress of Russia. —Selected.