IX

As long as the fall weather lasted, and well through the mild winter of

that latitude, our chief recreation, where all our novel duties were

delightful, was hunting with the long, smooth-bore shot-gun which had

descended laterally from one of our uncles, and supplied the needs of

the whole family of boys in the chase. Never less than two of us went

out with it at once, and generally there were three. This enabled us to

beat up the game over a wide extent of country, and while the eldest did

the shooting, left the others to rush upon him as soon as he fired, with

tumultuous cries of, "Did you hit it? Did you hit it?" We fell upon the

wounded squirrels which we brought down on rare occasions, and put them

to death with what I must now call a sickening ferocity. If sometimes

the fool dog, the weak-minded Newfoundland pup we were rearing, rushed

upon the game first, and the squirrel avenged his death upon the dog's

nose, that was pure gain, and the squirrel had the applause of his other

enemies. Yet we were none of us cruel; we never wantonly killed things

that could not be eaten; we should have thought it sacrilege to shoot a

robin or a turtledove, but we were willing to be amused, and these were

the chances of war.

The woods were full of squirrels, which especially abounded in the

woods-pastures, as we called the lovely dells where the greater part of

the timber was thinned out to let the cattle range and graze. They were

of all sorts--gray, and black, and even big red fox squirrels, a variety

I now suppose extinct. When the spring opened we hunted them in the

poplar woods, whither they resorted in countless numbers for the

sweetness in the cups of the tulip-tree blossoms. I recall with a thrill

one memorable morning in such woods--early, after an overnight rain,

when the vistas hung full of a delicate mist that the sun pierced to

kindle a million fires in the drops still pendulous from leaf and twig.

I can smell the tulip-blossoms and the odor of the tree-bark yet, and

the fresh, strong fragrance of the leafy mold under my bare feet; and I

can hear the rush of the squirrels on the bark of the trunks, or the

swish of their long, plunging leaps from bough to bough in the air-tops.

In a region where the corn-fields and wheat-fields were often fifty and

sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember only

one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they

were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without

harm to themselves. When they began to mate, and the air was full of

their soft, amorous whistling, we searched for their nests, and had

better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found

them; and in June, when a pretty little mother strutted across the lanes

at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near

spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us,

fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide

themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we

were charmed the same.

It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the

mother snipe and mother wild duck that haunted our dam, as well as by

the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother

would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on

one of her young--a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray

pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang

to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange

mixture--as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded

knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but

this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.

I had no such regrets concerning the young wild ducks, which, indeed, I

had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and

flutter away as she would, and took to the swamp where her young sought

refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that

were often up to my waist and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles

and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They

rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last

one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its

wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and

boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It

dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under

the water.

The center 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 pothooks, 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 historical

romance of its experience, or that the corn-meal, mixed warm from the

mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits beyond

the hoecake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new corn

grated from the cob while still in the milk, and then molded 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 draught 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. When we were 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.

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, but these spirited me again to Spain, where I had already

been with Irving, and led me to attack fitfully 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

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 of it were not many. By this time we

older boys had our axes, 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 inroad 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 scarcely 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

so easily.

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 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.

It was flat, and half under water in every spring freshet, but it had

precious areas grown up to tall ironweeds, which, withering and

hardening in the frost, supplied us with the 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. This book, and Howe's _Collections for

the History of Ohio_, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and

warriors who had made

[Illustration: _Overlooking the island which the Howells family

cultivated_]

our state a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our 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 spirit. With our

native romance I sometimes mingled from 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

the Indian chief Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle

in the waters of the Ohio.

X

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 cutworms which

swarmed in the upturned sod. 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 them of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now

imagine they were necessarily a day's journey in length. Neither could

the corn-field 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, and for this we were now

kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. 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. The fire had to be watched night and day,

and it often took all the boys of the neighborhood to watch it, and to

turn the boards. It must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I

remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn,

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 to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the river. 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 us, of bass. 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 and 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.

Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passed in

our 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

helplessly 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 have used sleighs in

the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads, and lasted

all winter. For a little while 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.

Our new house got on slowly. The log cabin had not become pleasanter

with the advance of the summer, and 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. 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. 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 little

village, namely, two miles away.

I try to give merely a child's memories 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. 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 for

her. 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 flatboat, which we kept on the smooth waters of our

dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed

far up, till we struck a 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 with the vast blue sky overhead,

were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe.

I recollect the complex effort of these Sunday afternoons as if they

were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer

nights, and there is one of these nights 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 after

twilight 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 stood in a parklike freedom from underbrush, and the

grass grew 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 densely 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.