I
In the fall of the year 1850 my father removed with his family from the
city of D----, where we had been living, to a property on the Little
Miami River, to take charge of a saw-mill and grist-mill, and
superintend their never-accomplished transformation into paper-mills.
The property belonged to his brothers--physicians and druggists--who
were to follow later, when they had disposed of their business in town.
My father left a disastrous newspaper enterprise behind him when he came
out to apply his mechanical taste and his knowledge of farming to the
care of their place. Early in the century his parents had brought him to
Ohio from Wales, and his boyhood was passed in the new country, where
pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, and for him it was like
renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the life in
a log-cabin interrupted by forty years’ sojourn in matter-of-fact
dwellings of frame and brick.
He had a passion for nature as tender and genuine and as deeply
moralized as that of the English poets, by whom it had been nourished;
and he taught us children all that he felt for the woods and fields and
open skies; all our walks had led into them and under them. It was the
fond dream of his boys to realize the trials and privations which he had
painted for them in such rosy hues, and even if the only clap-boarded
dwelling on the property had not been occupied by the miller, we should
have disdained it for the log-cabin in which we took up our home till we
could build a new house.
Our cabin stood close upon the road, but behind it broadened a cornfield
of eighty acres. They still built log-cabins for dwellings in that
region forty years ago, but ours must have been nearly half a century
old when we went into it. It had been recently vacated by an old
Virginian couple, who had long occupied it, and we decided that it
needed some repairs to make it habitable even for a family inured to
hardship by dauntless imaginations, and accustomed to retrospective
discomforts of every kind.
So before we all came out of it a deputation of adventurers put it in
what rude order they could. They glazed the narrow windows, they relaid
the rotten floor, they touched (too sketchily, as it afterwards
appeared) the broken roof, and they papered the walls of the
ground-floor rooms. Perhaps it was my father’s love of literature which
inspired him to choose newspapers for this purpose; at any rate, he did
so, and the effect, as I remember it, was not without its decorative
qualities.
He had used a barrel of papers bought at the nearest post-office, where
they had been refused by the persons to whom they had been
experimentally sent by the publisher, and the whole first page was taken
up by a story, which broke off in the middle of a sentence at the foot
of the last column, and tantalized us forever with fruitless conjecture
as to the fate of the hero and heroine. I really suppose that a cheap
wall-paper could have been got for the same money, though it might not
have seemed so economical.
I am not sure that the use of the newspapers was not a tributary
reminiscence of my father’s pioneer life; I cannot remember that it
excited any comment in the neighbors, who were frank with their opinions
of everything else we did. But it does not greatly matter; the
newspapers hid the walls and the stains with which our old Virginian
predecessor, who had the habit of chewing tobacco in bed, had
ineffaceably streaked the plastering near the head of his couch.
The cabin, rude as it was, was not without its sophistications, its
concessions to the spirit of modern luxury. The logs it was built of had
not been left rounded, as they grew, but had been squared in a saw-mill,
and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed
with clay in the true pioneer fashion, but had been neatly plastered
with mortar, and the chimney, instead of being a structure of
clay-covered sticks, was solidly laid in courses of stone.
Within, however, it was all that could be asked for by the most romantic
of pioneer families. It was six feet wide and a yard deep, its cavernous
maw would easily swallow a back-log eighteen inches through, and we
piled in front the sticks of hickory cord-wood as high as we liked. We
made a perfect trial of it when we came out to put the cabin in
readiness for the family, and when the hickory had dropped into a mass
of tinkling, snapping, bristling embers we laid our rashers of bacon and
our slices of steak upon them, and tasted with the appetite of tired
youth the flavors of the camp and the wildwood in the captured juices.
I suppose it took a day or two to put the improvements which I have
mentioned upon the cabin, but I am not certain. At night we laid our
mattresses on the sweet new oak plank of the floor, and slept hard--in
every sense. Once I remember waking, and seeing the man who was always
the youngest of his boys sitting upright on his bed.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Oh, resting!” he answered; and that gave us one of the Heaven-blessed
laughs with which we could blow away almost any cloud of care or pain.