The winter, which was so sore a trial for my mother in the log-cabin,
and was not, perhaps, such a poetic rapture for my father as he had
hoped, was a long delight to their children.
The centre of our life in the cabin was, of course, the fireplace, whose
hugeness and whose mighty fires remained a wonder with us. There was a
crane in the chimney and dangling pot-hooks, and until the cooking-stove
could be set up in an adjoining shed the cooking had to be done on the
hearth, and the bread baked in a Dutch-oven in the hot ashes. We had
always heard of this operation, which was a necessity of early days; and
nothing else, perhaps, realized them so vividly for us as the loaf laid
in the iron-lidded skillet, which was then covered with ashes and heaped
with coals.
I am not certain that the bread tasted any better for the romantic
picturesqueness of its experience, or that the cornmeal, mixed warm from
the mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits
beyond the hoe-cake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new
corn grated to meal when just out of the milk, and then moulded and put
in like manner to brown in the glow of such embers, would still have the
sweetness that was incomparable then. When the maple sap started in
February, we tried the scheme we had cherished all winter of making with
it tea which should be in a manner self-sugared. But the scheme was a
failure--we spoiled the sap without sweetening the tea.
We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the
glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draft that swept in from
the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the
loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull
up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion; but,
with the advancement of modern luxury, the ladder had been nailed to
the floor.
Once aloft, however, we were in a domain sacred to the past. The rude
floor rattled and wavered loosely under our tread, and the window in the
gable stood open or shut at its own will. There were cracks in the
shingles, through which we could see the stars, when there were stars,
and which, when the first snow came, let the flakes sift in upon the
floor. I should not like to step out of bed into a snow-wreath in the
morning now; but then I was glad to do it, and so far from thinking that
or anything in our life a hardship, I counted it all joy.
Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and
overhauling them one day I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain
Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old
grist-mill, whistling and wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my
ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the
“Spanish Student” there, and the “Coplas de Manrique” and the solemn and
ever-beautiful “Voices of the Night.”
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.