I have told the story of this venture in a little book called _My Year
in a Log Cabin_, printed twenty-odd years ago, and I cannot do better
now than let it rehearse
[Illustration: _The Little Miami River at Eureka Mills, twelve miles
east of Dayton. Here the ruin of the dam, which served the mills run by
Mr. Howells's father, makes a rapid in the stream._]
itself here from those pages, with such slight change or none as
insists. For my father, whose boyhood had been passed in the new
country, where pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, it was
like renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the
life in a log cabin interrupted by many years sojourn in matter-of-fact
dwellings of frame and brick. It was the fond dream of his boys to
realize the trials and privations which he had painted for them in rosy
hues, and even if the only clapboarded dwelling at the mills had not
been occupied by the miller, we should have disdained it for the log
cabin which we made our home till we could build a new house.
Our cabin stood close upon the road, but behind it broadened a
corn-field of eighty acres. They still built log cabins for dwellings in
that region at the time, but ours must have been nearly half a century
old when we went into it. It had been recently vacated by an old
poor-white 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 the family all came out to 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 afterward
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, had its decorative qualities. He had
used a barrel of papers from the nearest post-office, where they had
been refused by people to whom they had been experimentally sent by the
publishers, 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.
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 sawmill,
and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed
with clay in true backwoods fashion, but plastered with mortar, and the
chimney, instead of being a structure of clay-covered sticks, was laid
in courses of stone. Within, however, it was all that could be desired
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 the flavors of
the wildwood in the captured juices. At night we laid our mattresses on
the sweet new oak plank of the floor, and slept hard--in every sense.
In due time the whole family took up its abode in the cabin. The
household furniture had been brought out and bestowed in its scanty
space, the bookcase had been set up, and the unbound books left easily
accessible in barrels. There remained some of our possessions to follow,
chief of which was the cow; for in those simple days people kept cows in
town, and it fell to me to help my father drive ours out to her future
home. We got on famously, talking of the wayside things so beautiful in
the autumnal day, panoplied in the savage splendor of its painted
leaves, and of the books and authors so dear to the boy who limped
barefooted by his father's side, with his eye on the cow and his mind
on Cervantes and Shakespeare. But the cow was very slow--far slower than
the boy's thoughts--and it had fallen night and was already thick dark
when we had made the twelve miles and stood under the white-limbed
phantasmal sycamores beside the tail-race of the grist-mill, and
questioned how we should get across with our charge. We did not know how
deep the water was, but we knew it was very cold, and we would rather
not wade it. The only thing to do seemed to be for one of us to run up
to the sawmill, cross the head-race there, and come back to receive the
cow on the other side of the tail-race. But the boy could not bring
himself either to go or to stay.
The kind-hearted father urged, but he would not compel; you cannot well
use force with a boy when you have been talking literature and
philosophy for half a day with him. We could see the lights in the cabin
cheerfully twinkling, and we shouted to those within, but no one heard
us. We called and called in vain. Nothing but the cold rush of the
tail-race, the dry rustle of the sycamore-leaves, and the homesick
lowing of the cow replied. We determined to drive her across, and pursue
her with sticks and stones through the darkness beyond, and then run at
the top of our speed to the sawmill, and get back to take her in custody
again. We carried out our part of the plan perfectly, but the cow had
not entered into it with intelligence or sympathy. When we reached the
other side of the tail-race again she was nowhere to be found, and no
appeals of "Boss" or "Suky" or "Suboss" availed. She must have instantly
turned, and retraced, in the darkness which seemed to have swallowed her
up, the weary steps of the day, for she was found in her old home in
town the next morning. At any rate, she had abandoned the father to the
conversation of his son, for the time being, and the son had nothing to
say.
I do not remember now just how it was that we came by the different
"animals of the horse kind," as my father called them, which we housed
in an old log stable not far from our cabin. They must have been a
temporary supply until a team worthy our new sky-blue wagon could be
found. One of them was a colossal sorrel, inexorably hide-bound, whose
barrel, as horsemen call the body, showed every hoop upon it. He had a
feeble, foolish whimper of a voice, and we nicknamed him "Baby." His
companion was a dun mare, who had what my father at once called an
italic foot, in recognition of the emphatic slant at which she carried
it when upon her unwilling travels. Then there was a small,
self-opinionated gray pony, which was of no service conjecturable after
this lapse of time. We boys rode him barebacked, and he used to draw a
buggy, which he finally ran away with. I suppose we found him useful in
the representation of some of the Indian fights which we were always
dramatizing, and I dare say he may have served our turn as an Arab
charger, when the Moors of Granada made one of their sallies upon the
camp of the Spaniards, and discharged their javelins into it; their
javelins were the long, admirably straight and slender ironweeds that
grew by the river. This menagerie was constantly breaking bounds and
wandering off; and was chiefly employed in hunting itself up, its
different members taking turns in remaining in the pasture or stable, to
be ridden after those that had strayed into the woods.
The origin of a large and eloquent flock of geese is lost in an equal
obscurity. I recall their possession simply as an accomplished fact, and
I associate their desolate cries with the windy dark of rainy November
nights, so that they must at least have come into our hands after the
horses. They were fenced into a clayey area next the cabin for
safe-keeping, where, perpetually waddling about in a majestic
disoccupation, they patted the damp ground down to the hardness and
smoothness of a brick-yard. Throughout the day they conversed tranquilly
together, but by night they woke, goose after goose, to send forth a
long clarion alarum, blending in a general concert at last, to assure
one another of their safety. We must have intended to pluck them in the
spring, but they stole their nests early in March, and entered upon the
nurture of their young before we could prevent it; and it would then
have been barbarous to pluck these mothers of families.
We had got some pigs from our old Virginian predecessors, and these
kept, as far as they could, the domestic habits in which that
affectionate couple had indulged them. They would willingly have shared
our fireside with us, humble as it was, but, being repelled, they took
up their quarters on cold nights at the warm base of the chimney
without, where we could hear them, as long as we kept awake, disputing
the places next to the stones. All this was horrible to my mother, whose
housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions
of our life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if
poetic, was also not far from barbaric. But boys take every natural
thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs were other
than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed with long
cries of "Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!" but ours were taught to come at a
whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out from the
neighbors' pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered
corn with an intelligence we were proud of.