You ask me to give you some account of my life--how it was with me, and
now in my seventy-sixth year I find myself in the mood to do so. You
know enough about me to know that it will not be an exciting narrative
or of any great historical value. It is mainly the life of a country man
and a rather obscure man of letters, lived in eventful times indeed, but
largely lived apart from the men and events that have given character to
the last three quarters of a century. Like tens of thousands of
others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the
activities--political, commercial, sociological, scientific--of the
times in which I have lived. My life, like your own, has been along the
by-paths rather than along the great public highways. I have known but
few great men and have played no part in any great public events--not
even in the Civil War which I lived through and in which my duty plainly
called me to take part. I am a man who recoils from noise and strife,
even from fair competition, and who likes to see his days "linked each
to each" by some quiet, congenial occupation.
The first seventeen years of my life were spent on the farm where I was
born (1837-1854); the next ten years I was a teacher in rural district
schools (1854-1864); then I was for ten years a government clerk in
Washington (1864-1873); then in the summer of 1873, while a national
bank examiner and bank receiver, I purchased the small fruit farm on
the Hudson where you were brought up and where I have since lived,
cultivating the land for marketable fruit and the fields and woods for
nature literature, as you well know. I have gotten out of my footpaths a
few times and traversed some of the great highways of travel--have been
twice to Europe, going only as far as Paris (1871 and 1882)--the first
time sent to London by the Government with three other men to convey
$50,000,000 of bonds to be refunded; the second time going with my
family on my own account. I was a member of the Harriman expedition to
Alaska in the summer of 1899, going as far as Plover Bay on the extreme
N. E. part of Siberia. I was the companion of President Roosevelt on a
trip to Yellowstone Park in the spring of 1903. In the winter and spring
of 1909 I went to California with two women friends and extended the
journey to the Hawaiian Islands, returning home in June. In 1911 I again
crossed the continent to California. I have camped and tramped in
Maine and in Canada, and have spent part of a winter in Bermuda and in
Jamaica. This is an outline of my travels. I have known but few great
men. I met Carlyle in the company of Moncure Conway in London in
November, 1871. I met Emerson three times--in 1863 at West Point; in
1871 in Baltimore and Washington, where I heard him lecture; and at
the Holmes birthday breakfast in Boston in 1879. I knew Walt Whitman
intimately from 1863 until his death in 1892. I have met Lowell and
Whittier, but not Longfellow or Bryant; I have seen Lincoln, Grant,
Sherman, Early, Sumner, Garfield, Cleveland, and other notable men of
those days. I heard Tyndall deliver his course of lectures on Light in
Washington in 1870 or '71, but missed seeing Huxley during his visit
here. I dined with the Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not
impressed by them nor they by me. I met Matthew Arnold in New York and
heard his lecture on Emerson. My books are, in a way, a record of my
life--that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. You
could reconstruct my days pretty well from those volumes. A writer who
gleans his literary harvest in the fields and woods reaps mainly where
he has sown himself. He is a husbandman whose crop springs from the seed
of his own heart.
My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It
seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me. I have suffered no great
losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no
great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch, I have not wanted
the earth. I am pessimistic by night, but by day I am a confirmed
optimist, and it is the days that have stamped my life. I have found
this planet a good corner of the universe to live in and I am not in a
hurry to exchange it for any other. I hope the joy of living may be as
keen with you, my dear boy, as it has been with me and that you may have
life on as easy terms as I have. With this foreword I will begin the
record in more detail.
I have spoken of my good luck. It began in my being born on a farm, of
parents in the prime of their days, and in humble circumstances. I deem
it good luck, too, that my birth fell in April, a month in which so
many other things find it good to begin life. Father probably tapped
the sugar bush about this time or a little earlier; the bluebird and the
robin and song sparrow may have arrived that very day. New calves
were bleating in the barn and young lambs under the shed. There were
earth-stained snow drifts on the hillside, and along the stone walls and
through the forests that covered the mountains the coat of snow showed
unbroken. The fields were generally bare and the frost was leaving the
ground. The stress of winter was over and the warmth of spring began to
be felt in the air. I had come into a household of five children, two
girls and three boys, the oldest ten years and the youngest two. One had
died in infancy, making me the seventh child. Mother was twenty-nine and
father thirty-five, a medium-sized, freckled, red-haired man, showing
very plainly the Celtic or Welsh strain in his blood, as did mother,
who was a Kelly and of Irish extraction on the paternal side. I had come
into a family of neither wealth nor poverty as those things were looked
upon in those days, but a family dedicated to hard work winter and
summer in paying for and improving a large farm, in a country of wide
open valleys and long, broad-backed hills and gentle flowing mountain
lines; very old geologically, but only one generation from the stump in
the history of the settlement. Indeed, the stumps lingered in many
of the fields late into my boyhood, and one of my tasks in the dry
mid-spring weather was to burn these stumps--an occupation I always
enjoyed because the adventure of it made play of the work. The climate
was severe in winter, the mercury often dropping to 30° below, though we
then had no thermometer to measure it, and the summers, at an altitude
of two thousand feet, cool and salubrious. The soil was fairly good,
though encumbered with the laminated rock and stones of the Catskill
formation, which the old ice sheet had broken and shouldered and
transported about. About every five or six acres had loose stones and
rock enough to put a rock-bottomed wall around it and still leave enough
in and on the soil to worry the ploughman and the mower. All the farms
in that section reposing in the valleys and bending up and over
the broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone walls, and the
right-angled fields, in their many colours of green and brown and yellow
and red, give a striking map-like appearance to the landscape. Good
crops of grain, such as rye, oats, buckwheat, and yellow corn, are
grown, but grass is the most natural product. It is a grazing country
and the dairy cow thrives there, and her products are the chief source
of the incomes of the farms.
I had come into a home where all the elements were sweet; the water and
the air as good as there is in the world, and where the conditions of
life were of a temper to discipline both mind and body. The settlers of
my part of the Catskills were largely from Connecticut and Long Island,
coming in after or near the close of the Revolution, and with a good
mixture of Scotch emigrants.
My great-grandfather, Ephraim Burroughs, came, with his family of eight
or ten children, from near Danbury, Conn., and settled in the town
of Stamford shortly after the Revolution. He died there in 1818. My
grandfather, Eden, came into the town of Roxbury, then a part of Ulster
County.
I had come into a land flowing with milk, if not with honey. The maple
syrup may very well take the place of the honey. The sugar maple was the
dominant tree in the woods and the maple sugar the principal sweetening
used in the family. Maple, beech, and birch wood kept us warm in winter,
and pine and hemlock timber made from trees that grew in the deeper
valleys formed the roofs and the walls of the houses. The breath of kine
early mingled with my own breath. From my earliest memory the cow was
the chief factor on the farm and her products the main source of the
family income; around her revolved the haying and the harvesting. It was
for her that we toiled from early July until late August, gathering the
hay into the barns or into the stacks, mowing and raking it by hand.
That was the day of the scythe and the good mower, of the cradle and
the good cradler, of the pitchfork and the good pitcher. With the modern
agricultural machinery the same crops are gathered now with less than
half the outlay of human energy, but the type of farmer seems to have
deteriorated in about the same proportion. The third generation of
farmers in my native town are much like the third steeping of tea, or
the third crop of corn where no fertilizers have been used. The large,
picturesque, and original characters who improved the farms and paid for
them are about all gone, and their descendants have deserted the farms
or are distinctly of an inferior type. The farms keep more stock and
yield better crops, owing to the amount of imported grain consumed
upon them, but the families have dwindled or gone out entirely, and the
social and the neighbourhood spirit is not the same. No more huskings
or quiltings, or apple cuts, or raisings or "bees" of any sort. The
telephone and the rural free delivery have come and the automobile and
the daily newspaper. The roads are better, communication quicker,
and the houses and barns more showy, but the men and the women, and
especially the children, are not there. The towns and the cities are
now colouring and dominating the country which they have depleted of its
men, and the rural districts are becoming a faded replica of town life.
The farm work to which I was early called upon to lend a hand, as I have
said, revolved around the dairy cow. Her paths were in the fields and
woods, her sonorous voice was upon the hills, her fragrant breath was
upon every breeze. She was the centre of our industries. To keep her
in good condition, well pastured in summer and well housed and fed in
winter, and the whole dairy up to its highest point of efficiency--to
this end the farmer directed his efforts. It was an exacting occupation.
In summer the day began with the milking and ended with the milking; and
in winter it began with the foddering and ended with the foddering, and
the major part of the work between and during both seasons had for its
object, directly or indirectly, the well-being of the herd. Getting the
cows and turning away the cows in summer was usually the work of the
younger boys; turning them out of the stable and putting them back in
winter was usually the work of the older. The foddering them from the
stack in the field in winter also fell to the lot of the older members
of the family.
In milking we all took a hand when we had reached the age of about ten
years, Mother and my sisters usually doing their share. At first we
milked the cows in the road in front of the house, setting the pails of
milk on the stone work; later we milked them in a yard in the orchard
behind the house, and of late years the milking is done in the stable.
Mother said that when they first came upon the farm, as she sat milking
a cow in the road one evening, she saw a large black animal come out
of the woods out where the clover meadow now is, and cross the road and
disappear in the woods on the other side. Bears sometimes carried off
the farmers' hogs in those days, boldly invading the pens to do so. My
father kept about thirty cows of the Durham breed; now the dairy herds
are made up of Jerseys or Holsteins. Then the product that went to
market was butter, now it is milk. Then the butter was made on the farm
by the farmer's wife or the hired girl, now it is made in the creameries
by men. My mother made most of the butter for nearly forty years,
packing thousands of tubs and firkins of it in that time. The milk was
set in tin pans on a rack in the milk house for the cream to rise, and
as soon as the milk clabbered it was skimmed.
About three o'clock in the afternoon during the warm weather Mother
would begin skimming the milk, carrying it pan by pan to the big cream
pan, where with a quick movement of a case knife the cream was separated
from the sides of the pan, the pan tilted on the edge of the cream pan
and the heavy mantle of cream, in folds or flakes, slid off into the
receptacle and the thick milk emptied into pails to be carried to the
swill barrel for the hogs. I used to help Mother at times by handing
her the pans of milk from the rack and emptying the pails. Then came the
washing of the pans at the trough, at which I also often aided her by
standing the pans up to dry and sun on the big bench. Rows of drying tin
pans were always a noticeable feature about farmhouses in those days,
also the churning machine attached to the milk house and the sound of
the wheel, propelled by the "old churner"--either a big dog or a wether
sheep. Every summer morning by eight o'clock the old sheep or the old
dog was brought and tied to his task upon the big wheel. Sheep were
usually more unwilling churners than were the dogs. They rarely acquired
any sense of duty or obedience as a dog did. This endless walking and
getting nowhere very soon called forth vigorous protests. The churner
would pull back, brace himself, choke, and stop the machine: one churner
threw himself off and was choked to death before he was discovered. I
remember when the old hetchel from the day of flax dressing, fastened to
a board, did duty behind the old churner, spurring him up with its score
or more of sharp teeth when he settled back to stop the machine. "Run
and start the old sheep," was a command we heard less often after that.
He could not long hold out against the pressure of that phalanx of sharp
points upon his broad rear end.
The churn dog was less obdurate and perverse, but he would sometimes
hide away as the hour of churning approached and we would have to hustle
around to find him. But we had one dog that seemed to take pleasure in
the task and would go quickly to the wheel when told to and finish his
task without being tied. In the absence of both dog and sheep, I have
a few times taken their place on the wheel. In winter and early spring
there was less cream to churn and we did it by hand, two of us lifting
the dasher together. Heavy work for even big boys, and when the stuff
was reluctant and the butter would not come sometimes until the end of
an hour, the task tried our mettle. Sometimes it would not gather well
after it had come, then some deft handling of the dasher was necessary.
I never tired of seeing Mother lift the great masses of golden butter
from the churn with her ladle and pile them up in the big butter bowl,
with the drops of buttermilk standing upon them as if they were sweating
from the ordeal they had been put through. Then the working and the
washing of it to free it from the milk and the final packing into tub or
firkin, its fresh odour in the air--what a picture it was! How much of
the virtue of the farm went each year into those firkins! Literally
the cream of the land. Ah, the alchemy of Life, that in the bee can
transform one product of those wild rough fields into honey, and in the
cow can transform another product into milk!
The spring butter was packed into fifty-pound tubs to be shipped to
market as fast as made. The packing into one-hundred-pound firkins to be
held over till November did not begin till the cows were turned out to
pasture in May. To have made forty tubs by that time and sold them for
eighteen or twenty cents a pound was considered very satisfactory. Then
to make forty or fifty firkins during the summer and fall and to get as
good a price for it made the farmer's heart glad. When Father first came
on the farm, in 1827, butter brought only twelve or fourteen cents per
pound, but the price steadily crept up till in my time it sold from
seventeen to eighteen and a half. The firkin butter was usually sold
to a local butter buyer named Dowie. He usually appeared in early fall,
always on horseback, having notified Father in advance. At the breakfast
table Father would say, "Dowie is coming to try the butter to-day."
"I hope he will not try that firkin I packed that hot week in July,"
Mother would say. But very likely that was the one among others he would
ask for. His long, half-round steel butter probe or tryer was thrust
down the centre of the firkin to the bottom, given a turn or two, and
withdrawn, its tapering cavity filled with a sample of every inch of
butter in the firkin. Dowie would pass it rapidly to and fro under his
nose, maybe sometimes tasting it, then push the tryer back into the
hole, then withdrawing it, leaving its core of butter where it found it.
If the butter suited him, and it rarely failed to do so, he would make
his offer and ride away to the next dairy.
The butter had always to be delivered at a date agreed upon, on the
Hudson River at Catskill. This usually took place in November. It was
the event of the fall: two loads of butter, of twenty or more firkins
each, to be transported fifty miles in a lumber wagon, each round trip
taking about four days. The firkins had to be headed up and gotten
ready. This job in my time usually fell to Hiram. He would begin the
day before Father was to start and have a load headed and placed in the
wagon on time, with straw between the firkins so they would not rub. How
many times I have heard those loads start off over the frozen ground in
the morning before it was light! Sometimes a neighbour's wagon would go
slowly jolting by just after or just before Father had started, but on
the same errand. Father usually took a bag of oats for his horses and a
box of food for himself so as to avoid all needless expenses. The first
night would usually find him in Steel's tavern in Greene County, half
way to Catskill. The next afternoon would find him at his journey's end
and by night unloaded at the steamboat wharf, his groceries and other
purchases made, and ready for an early start homeward in the morning. On
the fourth night we would be on the lookout for his return. Mother would
be sitting, sewing by the light of her tallow dip, with one ear bent
toward the road. She usually caught the sound of his wagon first. "There
comes your father," she would say, and Hiram or Wilson would quickly
get and light the old tin lantern and stand ready on the stonework to
receive him and help put out the team. By the time he was in the house
his supper would be on the table--a cold pork stew, I remember, used to
delight him on such occasions, and a cup of green tea. After supper his
pipe, and the story of his trip told, with a list of family purchases,
and then to bed. In a few days the second trip would be made. As his
boys grew old enough he gave each of them in turn a trip with him to
Catskill. It was a great event in the life of each of us. When it came
my turn I was probably eleven or twelve years old and the coming event
loomed big on my horizon. I was actually to see my first steamboat, the
Hudson River, and maybe the steam cars. For several days in advance I
hunted the woods for game to stock the provision box so as to keep down
the expense. I killed my first partridge and probably a wild pigeon or
two and gray squirrels. Perched high on that springboard beside Father,
my feet hardly touching the tops of the firkins, at the rate of about
two miles an hour over rough roads in chilly November weather, I made
my first considerable journey into the world. I crossed the Catskill
Mountains and got that surprising panoramic view of the land beyond
from the top. At Cairo, where it seems we passed the second night, I
disgraced myself in the morning, when Father, after praising me to some
bystanders, told me to get up in the wagon and drive the load out in the
road. In my earnest effort to do so I ran foul of one side of the big
door, and came near smashing things. Father was humiliated and I was
dreadfully mortified.
With the wonders of Catskill I was duly impressed, but one of my most
vivid remembrances is a passage at arms (verbal) at the steamboat
between Father and old Dowie. The latter had questioned the correctness
of the weight of the empty firkin which was to be deducted as tare from
the total weight. Hot words followed. Father said, "Strip it, strip
it." Dowie said, "I will," and in a moment there stood on the scales the
naked firkin of butter, sweating drops of salt water. Which won, I do
not know. I remember only that peace soon reigned and Dowie continued to
buy our butter.
One other incident of that trip still sticks in my mind. I was walking
along a street just at dusk, when I saw a drove of cattle coming. The
drover, seeing me, called out, "Here, boy, turn those cows up that
street!" This was in my line, I was at home with cows, and I turned the
drove up in fine style. As the man came along he said, "Well done,"
and placed six big copper cents in my hand. Never was my palm more
unexpectedly and more agreeably tickled. The feel of it is with me yet!
At an earlier date than that of the accident in the old stone school
house, my head, and my body, too, got some severe bruises. One summer
day when I could not have been more than three years old, my sister Jane
and I were playing in the big attic chamber and amusing ourselves by
lying across the vinegar keg and pushing it about the room with our
feet. We came to the top of the steep stairway that ended against the
chamber door, a foot or more above the kitchen floor, and I suppose we
thought it would be fun to take the stairway on the keg. At the brink of
that stairway my memory becomes a blank and when I find myself again I
am lying on the bed in the "back-bedroom" and the smell of camphor is
rank in the room. How it fared with Jane I do not recall; the injury was
probably not serious with either of us, but it is easy to imagine how
poor Mother must have been startled when she heard that racket on the
stairs and the chamber door suddenly burst open, spilling two of her
children, mixed up with the vinegar keg, out on the kitchen floor. Jane
was more than two years my senior, and should have known better.
Vivid incidents make a lasting impression. I recall what might have been
a very serious accident had not my usual good luck attended me, when I
was a few years older. One autumn day I was with my older brothers
in the corn lot, where they had gone with the lumber wagon to gather
pumpkins. When they had got their load and were ready to start I planted
myself on the load above the hind axle and let my legs hang down between
the spokes of the big wheel. Luckily one of my brothers saw my perilous
position just as the team was about to move and rescued me in time.
Doubtless my legs would have been broken and maybe very badly crushed in
a moment more. But such good fortune seems to have followed me always.
One winter's morning, as I stooped to put on one of my boots beside the
kitchen stove at the house of a schoolmate with whom I had passed the
night, my face came in close contact with the spout of the boiling tea
kettle. The scalding steam barely missed my eye and blistered my brow
a finger's breadth above it. With one eye gone, I fancy life would have
looked quite different. Another time I was walking along one of the
market streets of New York, when a heavy bale of hay, through the
carelessness of some workman, dropped from thirty or forty feet above me
and struck the pavement at my feet. I heard angry words over the mishap,
spoken by someone above me, but I only said to myself, "Lucky again!" I
recall a bit of luck of a different kind when I was a treasury clerk in
Washington. I had started for the seashore for a week's vacation with a
small roll of new greenbacks in my pocket. Shortly after the train had
left the station I left my seat and walked through two or three of the
forward cars looking for a friend who had agreed to join me. Not finding
him, I retraced my steps, and as I was passing along through the car
next my own I chanced to see a roll of new bills on the floor near
the end of a seat. Instinctively feeling for my own roll of bills and
finding it missing, I picked up the money and saw at a glance that it
was mine. The passengers near by eyed me in surprise, and I suspect
began to feel in their own pockets, but I did not stop to explain and
went to my seat startled but happy. I had missed my friend but I might
have missed something of more value to me just at that time.
A kind of untoward fate seems inherent in the characters of some persons
and makes them the victims of all the ill luck on the road. Such a fate
has not been mine. I have met all the good luck on the road. Some kindly
influence has sent my best friends my way, or sent me their way. The
best thing about me is that I have found a perennial interest in the
common universal things which all may have on equal terms, and hence
have found plenty to occupy and absorb me wherever I have been. If the
earth and the sky are enough for one, why should one sigh for other
spheres?
The old farm must have had at least ten miles of stone walls upon it,
many of them built new by Father from stones picked up in the fields,
and many of them relaid by him, or rather by his boys and hired
men. Father was not skilful at any sort of craft work. He was a good
ploughman, a good mower and cradler, excellent with a team of oxen
drawing rocks, and good at most general farm work, but not an adept at
constructing anything. Hiram was the mechanical genius of the family. He
was a good wall-layer, and skilful with edged tools. It fell to his lot
to make the sleds, the stone-boats, the hay-rigging, the ax helves, the
flails, to mend the cradles and rakes, to build the haystacks, and once,
I remember, he rebuilt the churning machine. He was slow but he hewed
exactly to the line. Before and during my time on the farm Father
used to count on building forty or fifty rods of stone wall each year,
usually in the spring and early summer. These were the only lines of
poetry and prose Father wrote. They are still very legible on the face
of the landscape and cannot be easily erased from it. Gathered out of
the confusion of nature, built up of fragments of the old Devonian
rock and shale, laid with due regard to the wear and tear of time,
well-bottomed and well-capped, establishing boundaries and defining
possessions, etc., these lines of stone wall afford a good lesson in
many things besides wall building. They are good literature and good
philosophy. They smack of the soil, they have local colour, they are
a bit of chaos brought into order. When you deal with nature only the
square deal is worth while. How she searches for the vulnerable points
in your structure, the weak places in your foundation, the defective
material in your building!
The farmer's stone wall, when well built, stands about as long as he
does. It begins to reel and look decrepit when he begins to do so. But
it can be relaid and he cannot. One day I passed by the roadside to
speak with an old man who was rebuilding a wall. "I laid this wall fifty
years ago," he said. "When it is laid up again I shall not have the
job." He had stood up longer than had his wall.
A stone wall is the friend of all the wild creatures. It is a safe line
of communication with all parts of the landscape. What do the chipmunks,
red squirrels, and weasels do in a country without stone fences? The
woodchucks and the coons and foxes also use them.
It was my duty as a farm boy to help pick up the stone and pry up the
rocks. I could put the bait under the lever, even if my weight on top of
it did not count for much. The slow, patient, hulky oxen, how they would
kink their tails, hump their backs, and throw their weight into the bows
when they felt a heavy rock behind them and Father lifted up his voice
and laid on the "gad"! It was a good subject for a picture which, I
think, no artist has ever painted. How many rocks we turned out of their
beds, where they had slept since the great ice sheet tucked them up
there, maybe a hundred thousand years ago--how wounded and torn the
meadow or pasture looked, bleeding as it were, in a score of places,
when the job was finished! But the further surgery of the plough and
harrow, followed by the healing touch of the seasons, soon made all
whole again.
The work on the farm in those days varied little from year to year.
In winter the care of the cattle, the cutting of the wood, and the
thrashing of the oats and rye filled the time. From the age of ten or
twelve till we were grown up, we went to school only in winter, doing
the chores morning and evening, and engaging in general work every other
Saturday, which was a holiday. Often my older brothers would have to
leave school by three o'clock to get home to put up the cows in my
father's absence. Those school days, how they come back to me!--the long
walk across lots, through the snow-choked fields and woods, our narrow
path so often obliterated by a fresh fall of snow; the cutting winds,
the bitter cold, the snow squeaking beneath our frozen cowhide boots,
our trousers' legs often tied down with tow strings to keep the snow
from pushing them up above our boot tops; the wide-open white landscape
with its faint black lines of stone wall when we had passed the woods
and began to dip down into West Settlement valley; the Smith boys and
Bouton boys and Dart boys, afar off, threading the fields on their way
to school, their forms etched on the white hillsides, one of the bigger
boys, Ria Bouton, who had many chores to do, morning after morning
running the whole distance so as not to be late; the red school house
in the distance by the roadside with the dark spot in its centre made
by the open door of the entry way; the creek in the valley, often choked
with anchor ice, which our path crossed and into which I one morning
slumped, reaching the school house with my clothes freezing upon me
and the water gurgling in my boots; the boys and girls there, Jay Gould
among them, two thirds of them now dead and the living scattered from
the Hudson to the Pacific; the teachers now all dead; the studies, the
games, the wrestlings, the baseball--all these things and more pass
before me as I recall those long-gone days. Two years ago I hunted up
one of those schoolmates in California whom I had not seen for over
sixty years. She was my senior by seven or eight years, and I had a
boy's remembrance of her fresh sweet face, her kindly eyes and gentle
manners. I was greeted by a woman of eighty-two, with dimmed sight and
dulled hearing, but instantly I recognized some vestiges of the charm
and sweetness of my elder schoolmate of so long ago. No cloud was on her
mind or memory and for an hour we again lived among the old people and
scenes.
What a roomful of pupils, many of them young men and women, there was
during those winters, thirty-five or forty each day! In late years there
are never more than five or six. The fountains of population are drying
up more rapidly than are our streams. Of that generous roomful of young
people, many became farmers, a few became business men, three or
four became professional men, and only one, so far as I know, took to
letters; and he, judged by his environment and antecedents, the last one
you would have picked out for such a career. You might have seen in
Jay Gould's Jewish look, bright scholarship, and pride of manners some
promise of an unusual career; but in the boy of his own age whom he was
so fond of wrestling with and of having go home with him at night, but
whose visits he would never return, what was there indicative of the
future? Surely not much that I can now discover. Jay Gould, who became a
sort of Napoleon of finance, early showed a talent for big business and
power to deal with men. He had many characteristic traits which came
out even in his walk. One day in New York, after more than twenty years
since I had known him as a boy, I was walking up Fifth Avenue, when
I saw a man on the other side of the street, more than a block away,
coming toward me, whose gait arrested my attention as something I had
known long before. Who could it be? I thought, and began to ransack my
memory for a clew. I had seen that gait before. As the man came opposite
me I saw he was Jay Gould. That walk in some subtle way differed from
the walk of any other man I had known. It is a curious psychological
fact that the two men outside my own family of whom I have oftenest
dreamed in my sleep are Emerson and Jay Gould; one to whom I owe so
much, the other to whom I owe nothing; one whose name I revere, the
other whose name I associate, as does the world, with the dark way of
speculative finance. The new expounders of the philosophy of dreams
would probably tell me that I had a secret admiration for Jay Gould.
If I have, it slumbers deeply in my sub-conscious self and awakens only
when my conscious self sleeps.
But I set out to talk of the work on the farm. The threshing was mostly
done in winter with the hickory flail, one shock of fifteen sheaves
making a flooring. On the dry cold days the grain shelled easily. After
a flooring had been thrashed over at least three times, the straw was
bound up again in sheaves, the floor completely raked over and the grain
banked up against the side of the bay. When the pile became so large
it was in the way, it was cleaned up, that is, run through the fanning
mill, one of us shovelling in the grain, another turning the mill, and a
third measuring the grain and putting it into bags, or into the bins of
the granary. One winter when I was a small boy Jonathan Scudder threshed
for us in the barn on the hill. He was in love with my sister Olly Ann
and wanted to make a good impression on the "old folks." Every night at
supper Father would say to him, "Well, Jonathan, how many shock today?"
and they grew more and more, until one day he reached the limit of
fourteen and he was highly complimented on his day's work. It made an
impression on Father, but it did not soften the heart of Olly Ann. The
sound of the flail and the fanning mill is heard in the farmers' barns
no more. The power threshing machine that travels from farm to farm now
does the job in a single day--a few hours of pandemonium, with now and
then a hand or an arm crushed in place of the days of leisurely swinging
of the hickory flail.
The first considerable work in spring was sugar-making, always a happy
time for me. Usually the last half of March, when rills from the melting
snow began to come through the fields, the veins of the sugar maples
began to thrill with the spring warmth. There was a general awakening
about the farm at this time: the cackling of the hens, the bleating of
young lambs and calves, and the wistful lowing of the cows. Earlier in
the month the "sap spiles" had been overhauled, resharpened, and new
ones made, usually from bass wood. In my time the sap gouge was used
instead of the auger and the manner of tapping was crude and wasteful. A
slanting gash three or four inches long and a half inch or more deep was
cut, and an inch below the lower end of this the gouge was driven in to
make the place for the spile, a piece of wood two inches wide, shaped to
the gouge, and a foot or more in length. It gave the tree a double and
unnecessary wound. The bigger the gash the more the sap, seemed to be
the theory, as if the tree was a barrel filled with liquid, whereas a
small wound made by a half-inch bit does the work just as well and is
far less injurious to the tree.
When there came a bright morning, wind northwest and warm enough
to begin to thaw by eight o'clock, the sugar-making utensils--pans,
kettles, spiles, hogsheads--were loaded upon the sled and taken to the
woods, and by ten o'clock the trees began to feel the cruel ax and gouge
once more. It usually fell to my part to carry the pans and spiles for
one of the tappers, Hiram or Father, and to arrange the pans on a level
foundation of sticks or stones, in position. Father often used to haggle
the tree a good deal in tapping. "By Fagus," he would say, "how awkward
I am!" The rapid tinkle of those first drops of sap in the tin pan, how
well I remember it! Probably the note of the first song sparrow or first
bluebird, or the spring call of the nuthatch, sounded in unison. Usually
only patches of snow lingered here and there in the woods and the
earth-stained remnants of old drifts on the sides of the hills and along
the stone walls. Those lucid warm March days in the naked maple woods
under the blue sky, with the first drops of sap ringing in the pans,
had a charm that does not fade from my mind. After the trees were all
tapped, two hundred and fifty of them, the big kettles were again set
up in the old stone-arch, and the hogsheads in which to store the sap
placed in position. By four o'clock many of the pans--milk pans from the
dairy--would be full, and the gathering with neck yoke and pails began.
When I was fourteen or fifteen I took a hand in this part of the work.
It used to tax my strength to carry the two twelve-quart pails full
through the rough places and up the steep banks in the woods and then
lift them up and alternately empty them into the hogsheads without
displacing the neck yoke. But I could do it. Now all this work is done
by the aid of a team and a pipe fastened on a sled. Before I was old
enough to gather sap it fell to me to go to the barns and put in hay for
the cows and help stable them. The next morning the boiling of the sap
would begin, with Hiram in charge. The big deep iron kettles were slow
evaporators compared with the broad shallow sheet-iron pans now in use.
Profundity cannot keep up with shallowness in sugar-making, the
more superficial your evaporator, within limits, the more rapid your
progress. It took the farmers nearly a hundred years to find this out,
or at least to act upon it.
At the end of a couple of days of hard boiling Hiram would "syrup off,"
having reduced two hundred pails of sap to five or six of syrup. The
syruping-off often occurred after dark. When the liquid dropped from
a dipper which was dipped into it and, held up in the cool air, formed
into stiff thin masses, it had reached the stage of syrup. How we minded
our steps over the rough path, in the semi-darkness of the old tin
lantern, in carrying those precious pails of syrup to the house, where
the final process of "sugaring off" was to be completed by Mother and
Jane!
The sap runs came at intervals of several days. Two or three days would
usually end one run. A change in the weather to below freezing would
stop the flow, and a change to much warmer would check it.
The fountains of sap are let loose by frosty sunshine. Frost in the
ground, or on it in the shape of snow and the air full of sunshine are
the most favourable conditions. A certain chill and crispness, something
crystalline, in the air are necessary. A touch of enervating warmth from
the south or a frigidity from the north and the trees feel it through
their thick bark coats very quickly. Between the temperatures of
thirty-five to fifty degrees they get in their best work. After we have
had one run ending in rain and warmth, a fresh fall of snow--"sap snow",
the farmers call such--will give us another run. Three or four good runs
make a long and successful season. My boyhood days in the spring sugar
bush were my most enjoyable on the farm. How I came to know each one
of those two hundred and fifty trees--what a distinct sense of
individuality seemed to adhere to most of them, as much so as to each
cow in a dairy! I knew at which trees I would be pretty sure to find a
full pan and at which ones a less amount. One huge tree always gave
a cream-pan full--a double measure--while the others were filling an
ordinary pan. This was known as "the old cream-pan tree." Its place has
long been vacant; about half the others are still standing, but with the
decrepitude of age appearing in their tops, a new generation of maples
has taken the place of the vanished veterans.
While tending the kettles there beside the old arch in the bright, warm
March or April days, with my brother, or while he had gone to dinner,
looking down the long valley and off over the curving backs of the
distant mountain ranges, what dreams I used to have, what vague
longings, and, I may say, what happy anticipations! I am sure I gathered
more than sap and sugar in those youthful days amid the maples. When
I visit the old home now I have to walk up to the sugar bush and stand
around the old "boiling place," trying to transport myself back into the
magic atmosphere of that boyhood time. The man has his dreams, too, but
to his eyes the world is not steeped in romance as it is to the eyes of
youth.
One springtime in the sugar season my cousin, Gib Kelly, a boy of my own
age, visited me, staying two or three days. (He died last fall.) When
he went away I was minding the kettles in the woods, and as I saw him
crossing the bare fields in the March sunshine, his steps bent toward
the distant mountains, I still remember what a sense of loss came over
me, his comradeship had so brightened my enjoyment of the beautiful
days. He seemed to take my whole world with him, and on that and the
following day I went about my duties in the sap bush in a wistful and
pensive mood I had never before felt. I early showed the capacity for
comradeship. A boy friend could throw the witchery of romance over
everything. Oh, the enchanted days with my youthful mates! And I have
not entirely outgrown that early susceptibility. There are persons
in the world whose comradeship can still transmute the baser metal of
commonplace scenes and experiences into the purest gold of romance for
me. It is probably my feminine idiosyncrasies that explain all this.
Another unforgettable passion of comradeship in my youth I experienced
toward the son of a cousin, a boy four or five years old, or about half
my own age. One spring his mother and he were visiting at our house
eight or ten days. The child was very winsome and we soon became
inseparable companions. He was like a visitor from another sphere. I
frequently carried him on my back, and my heart opened to him more and
more each day. One day we started to come down a rather steep pair of
stairs from the hog-pen chamber; I had stepped down a few steps and
reached out to take little Harry in my arms, as he stood on the floor
at the head of the stairs, and carry him down, when in his joy he gave a
spring and toppled me over with him in my arms, and we brought up at
the bottom with our heads against some solid timbers. It was a severe
shake-up but hurt my heart more than it did my head because the boy was
badly bruised. The event comes back to me as if it were but yesterday.
For weeks after his departure I longed for him day and night and the
experience still shines like a star in my boyhood life. I never saw him
again until two years ago when, knowing he lived there, a practising
physician, I hunted him up in San Francisco. I found him a sedate
gray-haired man, with no hint, of course, of the child I had known and
loved more than sixty years before. It has been my experience on several
occasions to hunt up friends of my youth after the lapse of more than
half a century. Last spring I had a letter from a pupil of mine in the
first school I ever taught, in 1854 or '55. I had not seen or heard from
him in all those years when he recalled himself to my mind. The name
I had not forgotten, Roswell Beach, but the face I had. Only two weeks
ago, being near his town, it occurred to me to look him up. I did so and
was shocked to find him on his deathbed. Too weak to raise his head from
his pillow he yet threw his arms around me and spoke my name many times
with marked affection. He died a few days later. I was to him what some
of my old teachers were to me--stars that never set below my horizon.
My boyish liking for girls was quite different from my liking for
boys--there was little or no sense of comradeship in it. When I was
eight or nine years old there was one girl in the school toward whom
I felt very partial, and I thought she reciprocated till one day I
suddenly saw how little she cared for me. The teacher had forbidden us
to put our feet upon the seats in front of us. In a spirit of
rebellion, I suppose, when the teacher was not looking, I put my brown,
soil-stained bare feet upon the forbidden seat. Polly quickly spoke up
and said, "Teacher, Johnny Burris put his feet on the seat"--what a
blow it was to me for her to tell on me! Like a cruel frost those words
nipped the tender buds of my affection and they never sprouted again.
Years after, her younger brother married my younger sister, and maybe
that unkind cut of our school days kept me from marrying Polly. I had
other puppy loves but they all died a natural death.
But let me get back to the farm work.
The gathering of the things in the sugar bush, when the flow of sap had
stopped, usually fell to Eden and me. We would carry the pans and spiles
together in big piles, where the oxen and sled could reach them. Then
when they were taken to the house it was my mother's and sister's task
to get them ready for the milk.
The drawing out of the manure and the spring ploughing was the next
thing in order on the farm. I took a hand in the former but not in the
latter. The spreading of the manure that had been drawn out and placed
in heaps in the fields during the winter often fell to me. I remember
that I did not bend my back to the work very willingly, especially
when the cattle had been bedded with long rye straw, but there were
compensations. I could lean on my fork handle and gaze at the spring
landscape, I could see the budding trees and listen to the songs of the
early birds and maybe catch the note of the first swallow in the air
overhead. The farm boy always has the whole of nature at his elbow and
he is usually aware of it.
When, armed with my long-handled "knocker," I used to be sent forth
in the April meadows to beat up and scatter the fall droppings of the
cows--the Juno's cushions as Irving named them--I was in much more
congenial employment. Had I known the game of golf in those days I
should probably have looked upon this as a fair substitute. To stand the
big cushions up on edge and with a real golfer's swing hit them with my
mallet and see the pieces fly was more like play than work. Oh, then it
was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of
free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes
almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and
has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill
or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood
were duties that were a drag upon my spirits.
The spring ploughing and the sowing of the grain and harrowing fell
mainly to Father and my older brothers. The spring work was considered
done when the oats were sowed and the corn and potatoes planted: the
first in early May, the latter in late May. The buckwheat was not sown
until late June. One farmer would ask another, "How many oats are you
going to sow, or have you sown?" not how many acres. "Oh, fifteen or
twenty bushels," would be the answer.
The working of the roads came in June after the crops were in. All
hands, summoned by the "path master," would meet at a given date, at
the end of the district down by the old stone school house--men and boys
with oxen, horses, scrapers, hoes, crowbars--and begin repairing the
highway. It was not strenuous work, but a kind of holiday that we all
enjoyed more or less. The road got fixed after a fashion, here and
there--a bridge mended, a ditch cleaned out, the loose stones removed,
a hole filled up, or a short section "turnpiked"--but the days were
eight-hour days and they did not sit heavy upon us. The state does it
much better now with road machinery and a few men. Once or twice a year
Father used to send me with a hoe to throw the loose stones out of the
road.
A pleasanter duty during those years was shooting chipmunks around the
corn. These little rodents were so plentiful in my youth that they used
to pull up the sprouting corn around the margin of the field near the
stone walls. Armed with the old flint-lock musket, sometimes loaded
with a handful of hard peas, I used to haunt the edges of the cornfield,
watching for the little striped-backed culprits. How remorselessly
I used to kill them! In those days there were a dozen where there
is barely one now. The woods literally swarmed with them, and when
beechnuts and acorns were scarce they were compelled to poach upon the
farmer's crops. It was to reduce them and other pests that shooting
matches were held. Two men would choose sides as in the spelling
matches, seven or eight or more were on a side, and the side that
brought in the most trophies at the end of the week won and the losing
side had to pay for the supper at the village hotel for the whole crowd.
A chipmunk's tail counted one, a red squirrel's three, a gray squirrel's
still more. Hawks' heads and owls' heads counted as high as ten, I
think. Crows' heads also counted pretty high. One man who had little
time to hunt engaged me to help him, offering me so much per dozen
units. I remember that I found up in the sap bush a brood of young
screech owls just out of the nest and I killed them all. That man is
still owing me for those owls. What a lot of motley heads and tails
were brought in at the end of the week! I never saw them but wish I had.
Repeated shooting matches of this kind, in different parts of the state,
so reduced the small wild life, especially the chipmunks, that it has
not yet recovered, and probably never will. In those days the farmer's
hand was against nearly every wild thing. We used to shoot and trap
crows and hen hawks and small hawks as though they were our mortal
enemies. Farmers were wont to stand up poles in their meadows and set
steel traps on the top of them to catch the hen hawks that came for the
meadow mice which were damaging their meadows. The hen hawk is so named
because he rarely or never catches a hen or a chicken. He is a mouser.
We used to bait the hungry crows in spring with "deacon" legs and shoot
them without mercy, and all because they now and then pulled a little
corn, forgetting or not knowing of the grubs and worms they pulled and
the grasshoppers they ate. But all this is changed and now our sable
friends and the high-soaring hawks are seldom molested. The fool with a
rifle is very apt to shoot an eagle if the chance comes to him, but he
has to be very sly about it.
The buttercups and the daisies would be blooming when we were working
the road, and the timothy grass about ready to do so--pointing to the
near approach of the great event of the season, the one major task
toward which so many other things pointed--"haying;" the gathering of
our hundred or more tons of meadow hay. This was always a hard-fought
campaign. Our weapons were gotten ready in due time, new scythes and
new snaths, new rakes and new forks, the hay riggings repaired or built
anew, etc. Shortly after the Fourth of July the first assault upon the
legions of timothy would be made in the lodged grass below the barn. Our
scythes would turn up great swaths that nearly covered the ground and
that put our strength to a severe test. When noon came we would go to
the house with shaking knees.
The first day of haying meant nearly a whole day with the scythe, and
was the most trying of all. After that a half day mowing, when the
weather was good, meant work in curing and hauling each afternoon. From
the first day in early July till the end of August we lived for the
hayfield. No respite except on rainy days and Sundays, and no change
except from one meadow to another. No eight-hour days then, rather
twelve and fourteen, including the milking. No horse rakes, no mowing
machines or hay tedders or loading or pitching devices then. The scythe,
the hand rake, the pitchfork in the calloused hands of men and boys did
the work, occasionally the women even taking a turn with the rake or in
mowing away. I remember the first wire-toothed horse rake with its two
handles, which when the day was hot and the grass heavy nearly killed
both man and horse. The holder would throw his weight upon it to make
it grip and hold the hay, and then, in a spasm of energy, lift it up and
make it drop the hay. From this rude instrument, through various types
of wooden and revolving rakes, the modern wheeled rake, with which the
raker rides at his ease, has been evolved. At this season the cows were
brought to the yard by or before five, breakfast was at six, lunch in
the field at ten, dinner at twelve, and supper at five, with milking and
hay drawing and heaping up till sundown. Those mid-forenoon lunches of
Mother's good rye bread and butter, with crullers or gingerbread, and in
August a fresh green cucumber and a sweating jug of water fresh from the
spring--sweating, not as we did, because it was hot, but because it was
cold, partaken under an ash or a maple tree--how sweet and fragrant the
memory of it all is to me!
Till I reached my 'teens it was my task to spread hay and to rake after;
later I took my turn with the mowers and pitchers. I never loaded, hence
I never pitched over the big beam. How Father watched the weather! The
rain that makes the grass ruins the hay. If the morning did not promise
a good hay day our scythes would be ground but hung back in their
places. When a thunderstorm was gathering in the west and much hay was
ready for hauling, how it quickened our steps and our strokes! It was
the sound of the guns of the approaching foe. In one hour we would do,
or try to do, the work of two. How the wagon would rattle over the
road, how the men would mop their faces and how I, while hurrying, would
secretly exult that now I would have an hour to finish my crossbow or to
work on my pond in the pasture lot!
Those late summer afternoons after the shower--what man who has spent
his youth on the farm does not recall them! The high-piled thunder heads
of the retreating storm above the eastern mountains, the moist fresh
smell of the hay and the fields, the red puddles in the road, the robins
singing from the tree tops, the washed and cooler air and the welcomed
feeling of relaxation which they brought. It was a good time now to weed
the garden, to grind the scythes, and do other odd jobs. When the haying
was finished, usually late in August, in my time, there was usually a
let-up for a few days.
I was the seventh child in a family of ten children: Hiram, Olly Ann,
Wilson, Curtis, Edmond, and Jane came before me; Eden, Abigail, and
Eveline came after me. All were as unlike me in those mental qualities
by which I am known to the world as you can well conceive, but all were
like me in their more fundamental family traits. We all had the same
infirmities of character: we were all tenderfeet--lacking in grit, will
power, self-assertion, and the ability to deal with men. We were easily
crowded to the wall, easily cheated, always ready to take a back seat,
timid, complying, undecided, obstinate but not combative, selfish but
not self-asserting, always the easy victims of pushing, coarse-grained,
designing men. As with Father, the word came easy but the blow was slow
to follow. Only a year or two ago a lightning-rod man made my brother
Curtis and his son John have his rods put upon their barn against their
wills. They did not want his rods but could not say "No" with enough
force. He simply held them up and made them take his rods, willy nilly.
Curtis had maps, books, washing machines, etc., forced upon him in the
same way. I am able to resist the tree men, book agents, etc., and the
lightning-rod man, for a wonder, found me a decided non-conductor; but
I can see how my weaker brothers failed. I have settled a lawsuit rather
than fight it out when I knew law and justice were on my side. My wife
has often said that I never knew when I was imposed upon. I may know it
and yet feel that resenting it would cause me more pain than the affront
did. Strife and contention kill me, yet come easy to me, and did to all
my family. My sense of personal dignity, personal honour, is not a
plant of such tender growth that it cannot stand rough winds and
nipping frosts. That is a flattering way of saying that we are a very
non-chivalrous tribe and would rather run away than fight any time.
During the anti-rent war in Delaware County in 1844, Father, who was a
"down renter," once fled to a neighbour's house when he saw the posse
coming and took refuge under the bed, leaving his feet sticking out.
Father never denied it and never seemed a bit humiliated when twitted
about it. Grandfather Kelly seems to have used up all our fighting blood
in campaigning with Washington, though I more than half suspect that our
noncombativeness comes from the paternal side of the family. As a school
boy I never had a fight, nor have I ever dealt or received a hostile
blow since. And I never saw but one of my brothers fight at school, and
he fought the meanest boy in school and punished him well. I can see him
now, sitting on the prostrate form of the boy, with his hands clinched
in the boy's hair and jamming his face down into the crusty snow till
the blood streamed down his face. The nearest I ever came to a fight at
school was when, one noontime, we were playing baseball and a boy of my
own age and size got angry at me and dared me to lay my hand on him.
I did it quickly, but his bite did not follow his bark. I was never
whipped at school or at home that I can remember, though I no doubt
often deserved it. There was a good deal of loud scolding in our family
but very few blows.
Father and Mother had a pretty hard struggle to pay for the farm and to
clothe and feed and school us all. We lived off the products of the farm
to an extent that people do not think of doing nowadays. Not only was
our food largely home grown but our clothes also were home grown and
home spun. In my early youth our house linen and our summer shirts
and trousers were made from flax that grew on the farm. Those pioneer
shirts, how vividly I remember them! They dated from the stump, and bits
of the stump in the shape of "shives" were inwoven in their texture and
made the wearer of them an unwilling penitent for weeks, or until use
and the washboard had subdued them. Peas in your shoes are no worse than
"shives" on your shirt. But those tow shirts stood by you. If you lost
your hold in climbing a tree and caught on a limb your shirt or your
linen trousers would hold you. The stuff from which they were made had a
history behind it--pulled up by the roots, rooted on the ground, broken
with a crackle, flogged with a swingle, and drawn through a hetchel,
and out of all this ordeal came the flax. How clearly I remember Father
working with it in the bright, sharp March days, breaking it, then
swingling it with a long wooden sword-like tool over the end of an
upright board fixed at the base in a heavy block. This was to separate
the brittle fragments of the bark from the fibres of the flax. Then
in large handfuls he drew it through the hetchel--an instrument with
a score or more long sharp iron teeth, set in a board, row behind row.
This combed out the tow and other worthless material. It was a mighty
good discipline for the flax; it straightened out its fibres and made it
as clear and straight as a girl's tresses. Out of the tow we twisted bag
strings, flail strings, and other strings. With the worthless portions
we made huge bonfires. The flax, Mother would mass upon her distaff
and spin into threads. The last I saw of the old crackle, fifty or more
years ago, it served as a hen roost under the shed, and the savage old
hetchel was doing duty behind the old churner when he sulked and pulled
back so as to stop the churning machine. It was hetcheling wool then
instead of flax. The flax was spun on a quill which ran by the foot and
the quills or spools holding the thread were used in a shuttle when the
cloth was woven. The old loom stood in the hog-pen chamber, and there
Mother wove her linen, her rag carpets, and her woollen goods. I have
"quilled" for her many a time--that is, run the yarn off the reel into
spools for use in the shuttle.
Father had a flock of sheep which yielded wool enough for our stockings,
mittens, comforts, and underwear, and woollen sheets and comforts for
the beds. I have some of those home-made woollen sheets and bed covers
now at Slabsides.
Before the sheep were sheared in June they were driven two miles to the
creek to be washed. Washing-sheep-day was an event on the farm. It was
no small task to get the sheep off the mountain, drive them to the deep
pool behind old Jonas More's grist mill, pen them up there, and drag
them one by one into the water and make good clean Baptists of them!
But sheep are no fighters, they struggle for a moment and then passively
submit to the baptism. My older brothers usually did the washing and
I the herding. When the shearing was done, a few days later the poor
creatures were put through another ordeal, to which after a brief
struggle they quickly resigned themselves. Father did the shearing,
while I at times held the animal's legs. Father was not an adept hand
with the shears and the poor beast usually had to part with many a bit
of her hide along with her fleece. It used to make me wince as much as
it did the sheep to see the crests of those little wrinkles in her skin
clipped off.
I used to wonder how the sheep knew one another and how the lambs knew
their mothers when shorn of their fleeces. But they did. The wool was
soon sent to the fulling mill and made into rolls, though I have seen
it carded and made into rolls at home by hand. How many bundles of
rolls tied up into sheets I have seen come home! Then in the long summer
afternoons I would hear the hum of the big spinning wheel in the chamber
and hear the tread of the girl as she ran it, walking to and fro and
drawing out and winding up the yarn. The white rolls, ten inches or more
long and the thickness of one's finger, would lie in a pile on the beam
of the wheel and one by one would be attached to the spindle and drawn
out into yarn of the right size. Each new roll was welded on to the
end of the one that went before it so that the yarn did not show the
juncture. But now for more than sixty years the music of the spinning
wheel has not been heard in the land.