William Dean Howells

“ 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. [Pg 46]
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. ”

“ 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. All the time 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 at every moment she was looking; I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about there. ”

“ Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. 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. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding. ”

“ You cannot well use force with a boy with whom you have been talking literature and philosophy [Pg 9] for half a day. 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 saw-mill, and get back to take her in custody again. ”

“ Early in the century his parents had brought him to Ohio from Wales, and his boyhood was [Pg 2] passed in the new country, where pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, and for him it was like renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the life in a log-cabin interrupted by forty years’ sojourn in matter-of-fact dwellings of frame and brick.
He had a passion for nature as tender and genuine and as deeply moralized as that of the English poets, by whom it had been nourished; and he taught us children all that he felt for the woods and fields and open skies ”

“ 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 saw-mill, and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed with clay in the true pioneer [Pg 5] fashion, but had been neatly plastered with mortar, and the chimney, instead of being a structure of clay-covered sticks, was solidly laid in courses of stone. ”

“ There were not many boys in our neighborhood, and we brothers had to make the most of one another’s company. For a little while in the winter 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. ”

“ 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 all 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. ”

“ She was, in fact, a wild beast; but our own pigs were very social creatures. We had got some of them, I believe, from the old Virginians whom we had succeeded in the cabin, 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, and 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draft that swept in from the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion ”

“ In the fall of the year 1850 my father removed with his family from the city of D——, where we had been living, to a property on the Little Miami River, to take charge of a saw-mill and grist-mill, and superintend their never-accomplished transformation into paper-mills. The property belonged to his brothers—physicians and druggists—who were to follow later, when they had disposed of their business in town. My father left a disastrous newspaper enterprise behind him when he came out to apply his mechanical taste and his knowledge of farming to the care of their place. ”

“ 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 all his other enemies. ”

“ The timber was black-walnut and oak and hickory, and I cannot think we made much havoc in it; but we must have felled some of the trees, for I remember helping to cut them into saw-logs with the cross-cut saw, and the rapture we had in starting our logs from the [Pg 27] brow of the hill and watching their whirling rush to the bottom. We experimented, as boys will, and we felled one large hickory with the saw instead of the axe, and barely escaped with our lives when it suddenly split near the bark, and the butt shot out between us. ”

“ 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 turtle-dove, 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 wood-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. ”

“ I do not remember now just how it was that we came by the different “animals of the horse kind,” as my father humorously 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. ”

“ Nothing was ever drowned in those swift and sullen races, except our spool-pig, as they call the invalid titman of the herd in that region; though once one of the grist-miller’s children came near giving a touch of tragedy to their waters. He fell into the race just above the saw-mill gate, and was eddying round into the [Pg 49] rush upon its wheel, when I caught him by his long yellow hair, and pulled him out. ”

“ This fire had to be watched night and day, and it never took less than three or four boys, and often all the boys of the neighborhood, to watch it, and to turn and change the boards. The summer of [Pg 33] Southern Ohio is surely no joke, and it must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn, whose ears we 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. ”