Part 2

There were other books in those barrels which I must have read also, but I remember only these, that spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with Irving, and led me to attack seriously the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.

But neither these nor any other books made me discontented with the small-boy’s world about me. They made it a little more populous with visionary shapes, but that was well, and there was room for them all. It was not darkened with cares, and the duties in it were not many.

We had always worked, and we older boys had our axes now, and believed ourselves to be clearing a piece of woods which covered a hill belonging to the milling property. The timber was black-walnut and oak and hickory, and I cannot think we made much havoc in it; but we must have felled some of the trees, for I remember helping to cut them into saw-logs with the cross-cut saw, and the rapture we had in starting our logs from the brow of the hill and watching their whirling rush to the bottom. We experimented, as boys will, and we felled one large hickory with the saw instead of the axe, and barely escaped with our lives when it suddenly split near the bark, and the butt shot out between us. I preferred buckeye and sycamore trees for my own axe; they were of no use when felled, but they chopped delightfully.

VII

They grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had all the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. Yet no atoll in the far Pacific could have been more satisfactory to us. It was low and flat, and was half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall iron-weeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the spears and darts for our Indian fights.

The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called _Western Adventure_, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. I have wondered often since who wrote or compiled that book; we had printed it ourselves in D----, from the stereotype plates of some temporary publisher whose name is quite lost to me. This book, and _Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio_, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made our State a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our own life in the log-cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade;” of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day with undaunted spirits. With our native romance I sometimes mingled with my own reading a strain of old-world poetry, and “Hamet el Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio.

VIII

When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cut-worms which swarmed in the upturned sod. I have no recollection of really enjoying any of the visionary red-cores and white-cores which had furnished us a Barmecide feast when we planted their seed, and so I suppose none of them grew.

But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear their slopes of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length. Neither could the cornfield beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.

I dare say it was not well cared for, but an inexhaustible wealth of ears came into the milk just at the right moment for our enjoyment. We had then begun to build our new house. The frame had been raised, as the custom of that country still was, in a frolic of the neighbors, to whom unlimited coffee and a boiled ham had been served in requital of their civility, and now we were kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. To do this we had built a long skeleton hut, and had set the boards upright all around it and roofed it with them, and in the middle of it we had set a huge old cast-iron stove, in which we kept a roaring fire.

This fire had to be watched night and day, and it never took less than three or four boys, and often all the boys of the neighborhood, to watch it, and to turn and change the boards. The summer of Southern Ohio is surely no joke, and it must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn, whose ears we spitted on the points of long sticks and roasted in the red-hot stove; we must almost have roasted our own heads at the same time.

But I suppose that if the heat within the kiln or without ever became intolerable, we escaped from it and from our light summer clothing, reduced almost to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the river. In those days one went in swimming (we did not say bathing) four or five times a day with advantage and refreshment; anything more than that was, perhaps, thought unwholesome.

We had our choice of the shallows, where the long ripple was warmed through and through by the sun in which it sparkled, or the swimming-hole, whose depths were almost as tepid, but were here and there interwoven with mysterious cool under-currents.

We believed that there were snapping-turtles and water-snakes in our swimming holes, though we never saw any. There were some fish in the river, chiefly suckers and catfish in the spring, when the water was high and turbid, and in summer the bream that we call sunfish in the West, and there was a superstition, never verified by me, of bass. The truth is, we did not care much for fishing, though of course that had its turn in the pleasures of our rolling year.

There were crawfish, both hard shell and soft, to be had at small risk, and mussels in plenty. Their shells furnished us the material for many rings zealously, begun, never finished; we did not see why they did not produce pearls; but perhaps they were all eaten up, before the pearl-disease could attack them, by the muskrats, before whose holes their shells were heaped. Sometimes we saw a muskrat smoothly swimming to or from his hole, and making a long straight line through the water, and lusted for his blood; but he always chose the times for these excursions when we had not our trusty smooth-bore with us, and we stoned him in vain.

I have spoken of the freshets which sometimes inundated our island; but these were never very serious. They fertilized it with the loam they brought down from richer lands above, and they strewed its low shores with stranded drift. But there were so many dams on the river that no freshet could gather furious head upon it; at the worst, it could back up upon us the slack water from the mill-dam below us. Once this took place in such degree that our wheels stood still in their flooded tubs. This was a truly tremendous time. The event appears in the retrospect to have covered many days; I dare say it covered a half-day at most.

Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passes in that latitude without making ice enough for that sport, and there could not have been much sledding either. We read, enviously enough, in Peter Parley’s _First Book of History_, of the coasting on Boston Common, and we made some weak-kneed sleds (whose imbecile runners flattened hopelessly under them) when the light snows began to come; but we never had any real coasting, as our elders never had any real sleighing in the jumpers they made by splitting a hickory sapling for runners, and mounting any sort of rude box upon them. They might often have used sleighs in the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads, and lasted all winter.

There were not many boys in our neighborhood, and we brothers had to make the most of one another’s company. For a little while in the winter some of us went two miles away through the woods to school; but there was not much to be taught a reading family like ours in that log-hut, and I suppose it was not thought worth while to keep us at it. No impression of it remains to me, except the wild, lonesome cooing of the turtle-doves when they began to nest in the neighboring oaks.

IX

We had a poor fellow, named B----, for our saw-miller, whose sad fortunes are vividly associated with the loveliness of the early summer in my mind. He was a hapless, harmless, kindly creature, and he had passed most of his manhood in a sort of peonage to a rich neighboring farmer whom he was hopelessly in debt to, so that I suppose it was like the gift of freedom to him when he came into our employ; but his happiness did not last long.

Within a month or two he was seized with a flux that carried him off after a few days, and then began to attack his family. He had half a dozen children, and they all died, except one boy, who was left with his foolish, simple mother. My oldest brother had helped nurse them, and had watched with them, and seen them die; and it fell to me to go to the next village one morning and buy linen to make the last two of their shrouds. I mounted the italic-footed mare, barebacked, as usual, with my legs going to sleep on either side of her, but my brain wildly awake, and set out through the beautiful morning, turned lurid and ghastly by the errand on which I was bent.

When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth, or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels.

I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters in the unfenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again. So did the sun of the surviving B----s. The mother turned her household goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap for her son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards the town of X----, gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled after the bereavement of a single week.

X

Our new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding.

In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and our home was fashioned according to his plans.

It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town--from the pitiful little village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.

I try to give merely a child’s impressions of our life, which were nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for my mother especially, who could get no help, or only briefly and fitfully, in the work that fell to her. What her pleasures were I can scarcely imagine. She was cut off from church-going because we were Swedenborgians; short of Cincinnati, sixty miles away, there was no worship of our faith, and the local preaching was not edifying, theologically or intellectually.

Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of mental and spiritual refreshment. Otherwise, my father read us a service out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to us--Scott or Moore or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.

In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river. One such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flat boat, which we kept oil the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck the swift current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again.

It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam, where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves and the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe; and life was rich unspeakably.

I recollect the complex effect of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights when my brother used to row across the river to the cabin of the B----s, where the poor man and his children lay dying in turn, and I wondered and shuddered at his courage; but there is one night that remains single and peerless in my memory.

My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s--for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter--and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well into the night when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stand in a park-like freedom from underbrush, and the grass grows dense and rich among them.

We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the closely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed not only to liberate me from the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy. Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that whatever perishes there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.

XI

Our log-cabin, stood only a stone’s cast from the gray old weather-tinted grist-mill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. A soft sibilance ordinarily prevailed over the dull, hoarse murmur of the machinery; but late at night, when the water gathered that mysterious force which the darkness gives it, the voice of the mill had something weird in it like a human moan.

It was in all ways a place which I did not care to explore alone. It was very well, with a company of boys, to tumble and wrestle in the vast bins full of golden wheat, or to climb the slippery stairs to the cooling-floor in the loft, whither the little pockets of the elevators carried the meal warm from the burrs, and the blades

of the wheel up there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution. But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid basement, the angry whirl of the burrs under the hoppers, the high windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a pleasure to the boy’s sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians, of course, made it their ambush.

With the saw-mill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not keep the grist-mill’s unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when the upright-saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet smell of the bruised woody fibres, or then when the circular-saw wailed through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood touched it again, and it broke again into its long lament.

The warm sawdust in the pits below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought up the logs or carried away the lumber. How we should have lived through all these complicated mechanical perils I cannot very well imagine now; but there is a special providence that watches over boys and appoints the greater number of them to grow up in spite of their environment.

Nothing was ever drowned in those swift and sullen races, except our spool-pig, as they call the invalid titman of the herd in that region; though once one of the grist-miller’s children came near giving a touch of tragedy to their waters. He fell into the race just above the saw-mill gate, and was eddying round into the rush upon its wheel, when I caught him by his long yellow hair, and pulled him out. His mother came rushing from her door at the outcry we had all set up, and perceiving him safe, immediately fell upon him in merited chastisement. No notice, then or thereafter, was taken of his preserver by either of his parents; but I was not the less a hero in my own eyes.

XII

I cannot remember now whether it was in the early spring after our first winter in the log-cabin, or in the early part of the second winter, which found us still there, that it was justly thought fit I should leave these vain delights and go to earn some money in a printing-office in X----. I was, though so young, a good compositor, swift and clean, and when the foreman of the printing-office appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the place of a delinquent hand, there was no question with any one but myself that I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly upon me--a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence, pierced my heart and filled my throat, and blinded me with tears.

The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day’s grace was granted me, and then my older brother took me to X----, where he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky, apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must always be associated for me with the despair that then filled my soul, and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked, and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. All the time I had every fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing, especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing, and how at every moment she was looking; I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about there.

The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gayety, when they came in, added to my desolation.

The man said supper was about ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father came; but in my own mind it was closed.

My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either of us; we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that boardinghouse, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a year’s absence.

Again I was called to suffer this trial, the chief trial of my boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only by the experience of survival from it, but by various circumstances. This time I went to D----, where one of my uncles was still living, and he somehow learned the misery I was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in D----. I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, who stood to me for all that was at once naturally and conventionally refined, a type of gracious loveliness and worldly splendor.