XI

Our log cabin stood only a stone's-cast from the gray old weather-tinted

grist-mill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on

Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its

basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. A soft

sibilance prevailed by day over the dull, hoarse murmur of the

machinery; but late at night, when the water gathered that mysterious

force which the darkness gives it, the voice of the mill had something

weird in it like a human moan.

It was in all ways a place which I did not care to explore alone. It was

very well, with a company of boys, to tumble and wrestle in the vast

bins full of tawny wheat, or to climb the slippery stairs to the

cooling-floor in the loft, whither the little pockets of the elevators

carried the meal warm from the burrs, and the blades of the wheel up

there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening

circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution.

But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid

basement, the angry whirr of the millstones under the hoppers, the high

windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners

festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the

bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a

pleasure to the boy's sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and

experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary

steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians,

of course, made it their ambush.

With the sawmill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the

broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not

keep the grist-mill's unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when

the upright saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet

smell of the bruised woody fibers, or then when the circular saw wailed

through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and

freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood

[Illustration: _The vicinity where Mr. Howells lived his "Year in a

Log Cabin." The cabin stood near the two pines_]

touched it again, and it broke again into its shrill lament. The warm

sawdust in the pit below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm

meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought

up the logs or carried away the lumber.

It was in the early part of the second winter that it was justly thought

fit I should leave these delights and go to earn some money in a

printing-office in X----, when the foreman of the printing-office

appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the

place of a delinquent hand. There was no question with any one but

myself but I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly

upon me--a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence,

pierced my heart and filled my throat.

The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day's

grace was granted me, and then my elder brother took me to X----, where

he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from

Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but

the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky,

apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must

always be associated for me with the despair which then filled my soul

and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked,

and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free

himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the

time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. I had every

fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing,

especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing,

and how she was looking; and I saw the wretched little phantasm of

myself moving about among them.

The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of

me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and

delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There

were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gaiety,

when they came in, added to my desolation. The man said supper was about

ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for

myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any

supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell

something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with

him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of

homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father

came; but in my own mind it was closed.

My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either

of us: we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that

boarding-house, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We

went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot

biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars

apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had

found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a

year's absence.

Again I was called to suffer a like trial, the chief trial of my

boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only

by the experience of survival from it, but by kindly circumstance. This

time I went to Dayton, where my young uncle somehow learned the misery I

was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in the town.

I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, but for

all that, I was homesick still. I fell asleep with the radiant image of

our log cabin before my eyes, and I woke with my heart like lead in my

breast.

I did not see how I could get through the day, and I began it with

miserable tears. I had found that by drinking a great deal of water at

my meals I could keep down the sobs for the time being, and I practised

this device to the surprise and alarm of my relatives, who were troubled

at the spectacle of my unnatural thirst. But I could not wholly hide my

suffering, and I suppose that after a while the sight of it became

intolerable. At any rate, a blessed evening came when I returned from my

work and found my brother waiting for me at my uncle's house; and the

next morning we set out for home in the keen, silent dark before the

November dawn.

We were both mounted on the italic-footed mare, I behind my brother,

with my arms round him to keep on better; and so we rode out of the

sleeping town, and into the lifting shadow of the woods. They might have

swarmed with ghosts or Indians; I should not have cared; I was going

home. By and by, as we rode on, the birds began to call one another from

their dreams, the quails whistled from the stubble fields, and the crows

clamored from the decaying tops of the girdled trees in the deadening;

the squirrels raced along the fence-rails, and, in the woods, they

stopped half-way up the boles to bark at us; the jays strutted down the

shelving branches to offer us a passing insult and defiance.

Sometimes, at a little clearing, we came to a log cabin; the blue smoke

curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the low hum of

a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew,

dripped round us; I was profoundly at peace, and the homesick will

understand how it was that I was as if saved from death. At last we

crossed the tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log

cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted

during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant

welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that

it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat

was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her

honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of

steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was

"company."

It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new

house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been

able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its

partitions, and the closely fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering.

I roamed through the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and freshly

admired the familiar outside of the house as if it were as novel as the

interior, where open wood fires blazed upon the hearths and threw a

pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.

I must have gone through the old log cabin to see how it looked without

us, but I have no recollection of ever entering its door again, so soon

had it ceased to be part of my life. We remained in the new house, as we

continued to call it, for two or three months, and then the changes of

business which had been taking place without the knowledge of us

children called us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and

the pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode in

city streets again. We went to live in the ordinary brick house of our

civilization, but we had grown so accustomed, with the quick and facile

adaptation of children, to living in a house which was merely lathed,

that we distinguished this last dwelling from the new house as a

"plastered house."

Some of our playmates of the neighborhood walked part of the way to

X---- with us boys, the snowy morning when we turned our backs on the

new house to take the train in that town. A shadow of the gloom in

which our spirits were steeped passes over me again, but chiefly I

remember our difficulties in getting our young Newfoundland dog away

with us; and our subsequent embarrassments with him on the train, where

he sat up and barked out of the window at the passing objects and

finally became seasick, blot all other memories of that journey from my

mind.