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KANSAS CITY. MO PUBLIC LIBRARY
D DDD1 DISflSbO E
NEW ENGLAND AND ITS NEIGHBORS
SPRINGTIME IN AN OLD GARDEN
NEW -
AND ITS;
NEIGHBORS
WRITTEN AND
ILLUSTRATED BY
CLIFTON JOHNSON
gorit
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1924
reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1902,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1902 Reprinted
November, 1902; March, 1912; January, 1924.
Waifcmofc
J. S. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co.
^1S Norwood, Mass., U SA.
404807
Contents
Page
I. Midwinter in Valley Forge ..... i
II. When the White Mountains are White ... 24
III. A Ruin beside Lake Champlain - . . . .52
IV. In the Adirondacks ...... 70
V. The Home of Fenimore Cooper . . . .106
VI. An Historic Town in Connecticut . . . 1 24
VII. A Jaunt on Long Island . . . . 147
VIII. Life on a Green Mountain Top . . . .168
IX. Down in Maine ....... 196
X. Along the Juniata . . . * .215
XI. Dwellers among the Catskills 24
XII. A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson . . . 264
XIII. The Autumn Cattle Show 287
XIV. Cape Cod Folks 3*3
List of Illustrations
Page
Springtime in an Old Garden .... Frontispiece
In Valley Forge t
Valley Forge Pond Facing 4
The Site of the Old Forge 8
One of the Bridges over "Valley Crick" .... 9
The Schuylkill at Valley Forge 13
A Valley Forge Footpath Facing 1 8
The Entrance to the Headquarters Mansion . . . .21
The House which was Washington s Headquarters . . 23
A Woodland Teamster ....... 24
A Load of Logs on a Forest Roadway . . Facing 26
Work at a Logging-camp Landing . . . Facing 33
The Choppers 35
A Woodsman s Rocking-chair . . . . . -37
A Mountain Ox-team 40
In the Sleeping Apartment ...... 43
A Corner of the Camp Kitchen 46
A Sealer . ...... Facing 48
A Logging-camp Dwelling . . . . . 51
Considering his Neighbor s Fields . . . . .52
In Crown Point Village . . . . . . .54
x List of Illustrations
Page
Mending the Pasture Fence .... Facing 56
A Lake Champlain Ferry ..... Facing 59
Rhubarb ......... 61
Ticonderoga Ruins ........ 65
The Pasture in which stand the Old Fortifications ... 69
A Fisherman ... ..... 70
An Adirondack Farmer ..... Facing 77
Shelling Seed Corn 80
Bringing in the Cows after their Day s Grazing ... 82
Picking up Chips 85
The Kitchen Door of a Log House . . . Facing 89
Sowing Oats 93
Spinning Yarn for the Family Stockings .... 96
A Home in a Valley 99
A Roadside Chat ........ 105
On Cooperstown Street . . . . . . .106
Looking toward the Town from an Eastern Hillslope . .109
The Margin of the Lake Facing in
Putting on a Fresh Coat of Paint 113
Getting Ready to plant his Garden . . . Facing 1 1 5
Spring Work in a Farm Field . . . . . , 1 17
The Monument on the Site of Otsego Hall . . Facing 1 19
The Graves of J. Fenimore Cooper and his Wife . . .123
Setting out the House-plants 1 24
Saytfook Street ...... 125
In a Back Yard 12 g
oat for Potatoes .130
List of Illustrations xi
Page
A Roadway on the Saybrook Outskirts . . . 131
Drawing a Bucket of Water .... Facing 134
In the Old Cemetery . . . . . . -137
Cleaning up the Back Yard .... Facing 141
The Seaward Marshlands . . . . . .146
Starting the Garden Parsnips . . . . . -147
A Long Island Stile . Facing 149
On Easthampton Common . . . . . .152
The " Home, Sweet Home " House 155
An Old-fashioned Sitting Room . . , 1 59
A Toll-gate on a Seven Cent Road 161
Making Fence Posts ..... Facing 165
A Windmiller ........ 166
Along Shore at Sag Harbor . . . . . .167
Tinkering the Road 1 68
At the Schoolhouse Door . . . . . . 1 7 \
A Trout Stream - * 74
The Fiddler Facing 179
Grandpa gives the Boys some Good Advice . . . .181
The Rain-water Barrel . . . . - .184
Taking Care of the Baby Facing 191
The Lonely Little Church * 193
A Home-made Lumber Wagon . . . . . J 95
A Mount Desert Well *9 6
A Lobster-pot . . 1 99
A Home on the Shore 2O1
Summer Calm ....*. Facing 202
xii List of Illustrations
Page
The Post-office Piazza ..... Facing 206
An Old Schoolroom . . . . . . .210
A Moonlit Evening . . . . . . .214
The Home Porch . . . . . . . .215
The Dooryard Fence . . . . . . .218
After the Day s Work Facing 220
Typical Outbuildings . . . . . . .224
A Grist-mill 225
Making Apple-butter . . . . . . .227
Childhood Treasures . . . . . . .230
Farm Market Wagons . . . . . . " . 232
One of the Street Pumps ..... Facing 237
On a Village Sidewalk ....... 238
Thejuniata 2 39
Old-fashioned Churning ....... 240
Digging Potatoes in a Weedy Field 242
A Home on the Mountain Side 245
The Buckwheat Thresher Fair Weather or Foul ? . . 247
A Morning Wash at the Back Door . . . Facing 251
On the Way to the Barn to help Milk . . Facing 254
Making Soft Soap p acing 257
Binding Indian Corn 260
Considering 263
Trading with a Bumboat 2 4
The Call to Dinner Facing z6?
V^g 272
Drawing Water 2?4
List of Illustrations xiii
Page
Two Canal -boat Captains .... Facing 277
The Steamer dragging the Tow . . . . .281
House-cleaning Time ..... Facing 282
Arriving in New York . . . . . . .286
The "Nigger" Target 287
Children Sightseers 291
Without the Gate . . . . . . . . 293
The Stage from the Neighboring Town . . . .294
The Cavalcade of Oxen 299
On the Grounds 301
To Buy or Not to Buy ..... Facing 303
Cooking Apparatus at the Rear of the Eating Tents . . 307
The Pounding-machine ..... Facing 309
Five Cents a Throw at the Dolls . . . . .312
A Village Sign . . . . . . . 3 1 3
Anchoring his Haystacks . . . . . . .316
An Autumn Corn-field . . . . . . 319
A Cranberry Picker . . . . . . .321
Harvest on a Cranberry Bog . . . . .322
In Province town ...... Facing 325
Looking over the Cod Lines . . . . . .327
An Old Wharf ...... Facing 330
Public Buildings on the Hilltop . . . . . 3 3 1
A Cape Cod Roadway . . . . . . 333
The Mowers on the Marshes . . . . . 335
Introductory Note
THIS book is primarily a study of the rural aspects
of national life in the several New England states
and the neighboring states of New York and Penn
sylvania. The historic or literary background that
some of the chapters have is only incidental, and
in no case is introduced for its own sake. I have
sometimes dealt with sections that are famous and
much travelled, but it is their humbler features that
I love best, and it is these I linger over in my pictures
and my descriptions. Wherever I go, the character
istic and picturesque phases of the local farm environ
ment always appeal strongly to me, and in what I have
written I have tried to convey to others the same inter
est I have felt, and at the same time have endeavored
to give a clear and truthful impression of the reality.
Clifton Johnson.
Hadley, Massachusetts.
New England and its Neighbors
In Valley Forge
MIDWINTER IN VALLEY FORGE
MY impression had been
that Valley Forge was a
wild glen, high among
the mountains, where winter frosts
and snows held unrelaxing sway
for many long, dark months every
year. But in reality its situation
is neither lofty nor remote, and
the rigors of the cold are not
nearly what they are in the states
farther north. Comparatively lit
tle snow falls, and often there is
not a week s sleighing the winter
through.
The Valley is only twenty-three
miles from Philadelphia, with
which it has direct connection by
a railroad that skirts along the
Schuylkill River. When you alight
2 New England and its Neighbors
from the train you find a diminutive station, and, on
the opposite side of the tracks, a freight-shed and an
ancient, broken-roofed mill. But immediately beyond
the old mill is the colonial mansion which was Wash
ington s headquarters, and beyond that lies the vil
lage a straggling little place, scattered along several
diverging roads. A good-sized stream courses north
ward through the midst of the hamlet to join the
Schuylkill, and beside it are two mills. These, like
the one adjoining the station, are vacant and crumbling.
The smaller of the two is mostly constructed of wood.
The other is of brick a great barrack of a building,
painted white, with tiny-paned windows of days gone
by. Near it stand some rows of dilapidated mill cot
tages gradually dropping to pieces; and, taken alto
gether, a melancholy air of industrial ruin hangs over
the Valley.
A massive dam stems the stream above the big mill,
but the water-power is in no way utilized, and the
manufacturing of the present is confined to a racka-
bones structure on the western outskirts of the village,
where a stone-crusher reduces to sand a peculiar rock
from an upland quarry. About five car-loads of sand
are turned out daily and shipped away to foundries,
for use in making moulds.
My acquaintance with Valley Forge began in the
early evening of a day in February. I walked from
the station to the village and looked about vainly in the
Midwinter in Valley Forge 3
dusk for a hotel. Finally I appealed to a passer, who
pointed out one close by. It was girded around by
ornamental piazzas and surmounted by a very fancy
cupola, and I had mistaken it for some gentleman s
villa. Moreover, its spacious grounds were adorned
with fine trees that gave a touch of the idyllic, though
the lager-beer signs which their trunks supported were
something of an offset to this impression. Winter
visitors* are rare, and I took the landlord by surprise.
He explained apologetically that his cook had just
left, and he and his father were the only persons in the
house. They were going to shift for themselves until
they found another cook, but if I wanted to lodge with
them, he would get some neighbor to come in and help
in the kitchen. I accepted the situation, and after I
had disposed of my luggage I started out for a walk.
It was a pleasant, quiet night, with a half-moon high
in the sky. The ground was mostly bare, and the
wheeling on the frost-bound roads could hardly have
been better. Only under shadowed banks and on the
northward-sloping hills was there snow, though the
streams, wherever the cold had a fair chance at them,
were frozen tight and fast. Much of the valley was
overflowed by a long, narrow pond that set back from
the dam of the large upper mill. On the borders of
this pond I came across a young fellow regarding the
ice attentively, and I spoke to him. He had been
testing the surface with his heels to see if there was
4 New England and its Neighbors
skating, and had concluded it had been too much
softened by the heat of the day, but that it would
harden up all right during the night. " A good many
come here skating," he said "mostly Sundays, and
other days, and some nights, and daytimes, too."
I asked him what the name of the stream was, and
he replied that he d " be hanged " if he knew. He d
never heard it called anything but " the dam."
Then I inquired the name of the larger stream to
the north; but he had to "be hanged" again he d
lived here twenty years, all his life and never heard
it spoken of as anything except " the river."
This was not very encouraging, but when we con
tinued our chat I found his information about the vil
lage itself more definite and satisfactory. Some of the
people depended wholly on their little farms, but the
majority of the male population were either employed
at the quarry on the hill and the stone-crusher, or at a
brick-yard about two miles distant ; and ten or twelve
of the village girls went daily by train six miles down
the river to work in a cotton-mill. He told how
crowds of people flocked to the Valley in the summer,
some to stay several days or weeks, but mostly picnick
ers who came in the morning and went in the late after
noon. There were boats to let on the pond, and the
summer people "rowed and fished and caught carp
that weighed thirty pounds."
I mentioned that from up the hill where I had been
VALLEY FORGE POND
On the hill in the background were the most important of Washington s fortificationr
Midwinter in Valley Forge 5
before I visited the pond I had seen what looked like
the lights of a town off to the northeast.
" Were the lights all in a bunch? " he asked.
"Yes," I responded.
" That s a protectory."
" A what ? "
"A protectory some big buildings where they
keep boys boys that have been bad. A lot of em
got away last July took the sheets off their beds_ and
tied em together and shinned down on em from a
window. They started off for Philadelphia, but they
were all caught."
My companion had no overcoat on, and he began to
get shivery. So he turned his collar up a little closer
about his ears and said he guessed he d go over to the
store. I turned in the other direction and walked up
the pond on the ice. The village lay behind me,
wooded hills rose on either side, and with the moon
light glistening on the ice, the scene, in .spite of its
loneliness, was pleasantly romantic.
When I returned to the hoteJ the evening was well
advanced and I soon retired. I wished afterward I
had sat up later, for I had the coldest, most unsympa
thetic bed I have met with in all my experience.
There were plenty of blankets and quilts ; but the
foundation was a corn-husk mattress that had apparently
been absorbing frost for months, and I did not get
comfortably warm all night.
New England and its Neighbors
[n the morning one of the village women had charge
of the kitchen and prepared the breakfast. I had just
come down to the office when she put her head in at
the door and asked, " Will yees eat now ? "
The two men of the establishment rose and led the
way through several cold vacant rooms and passages
to the rear of the house. They themselves ate in the
kitchen, but I was directed to a corner of one of the
tables in the adjoining dining room. It was not a very
sociable arrangement, and I liked it the less because the
little stove at my elbow only succeeded in tempering
the chilly atmosphere of the big apartment. Conver
sation was confined to a few remarks passed with the
substitute cook.
" Fve had to spind the biggest part of me time here
this winter," she said. " The young girruls the hotel
do get will not stay. It is too cowld and lonesome.
They likes the city betther ; and so I have to be always
runnin 1 in to help from my house that s up here for-
nent the ould mill."
I noticed her house later in the morning when I was
out walking. Around it was much litter and a curious
conglomeration of patched-up shanties for the domestic
animals, which included a lively brood of nondescript
fowls and a sober family goat. All in all the place
looked as if it had been transplanted bodily from the
woman s native Ireland.
That visitors to the Valley were many was attested
Midwinter in Valley Forge 7
by the numerous wayside signs warning against tres
passing. These were a characteristic and predominant
feature of the landscape. They were set up on posts
and tacked to trees and fences everywhere and sug
gested a wild raid of tourists in the season. Most of
them threatened you with the law, but others confined
themselves to a laconic, " Keep Off! "
The day was gentle and springlike, the atmosphere
full of haze and odorous of coal gas from the engines
of the freight trains that were constantly throbbing and
hissing along the railway. The mildness of Nature s
mood made it far from easy to call up the mental
picture of the hardships of that far-gone winter when
Washington was there, and any sentiment of seclusion
was impossible with that noisy, sulphurous railroad
immediately at hand and the knowledge that it could
carry me straight to the heart of Philadelphia in little
more than half an hour.
I think the casual student of history fancies that
Valley Forge sheltered the whole patriot army. On
the contrary, only a small portion of the troops dwelt
there. At the rear of Washington s headquarters the
life guards were encamped, and across "Valley Crick"
were General Stirling s men ; but the rest of the army
was over the hill eastward. The area of ground suit
able for camping in the Valley itself is not large, for to
the south it almost at once becomes a narrow, irregular
defile hemmed in by steep slopes of loose stones.
8 New England and its Neighbors
A half mile up the ravine stood the old forge an
iron-working plant that was established long before the
Revolution, and that was known in its earlier days as
the Mount Joy forge. It did a flourishing business
and employed many men and teams. John Potts, a
Quaker, purchased it in 1757, and immediately after
ward built at the mouth of the creek a flour-mill and
The Site of the Old Forge
a stout stone residence. Just before the war this dwell
ing and mill passed to his son Isaac, in whose posses
sion they were when Washington made his official
home in the house.
Another half mile up the Valley beyond the site of
the old forge the hills cease and the road, which" hitherto
has been creeping along the margin of the stream, goes
through a covered wooden bridge of picturesque type
Midwinter in Valley Forge 9
and strikes off in several divisions across the rolling
farmlands that sweep away as far as the eye can see.
On this side of the hills all the oldest farm-houses for
One of the Bridges over "Valley Crick"
miles around were headquarters of Revolutionary
generals in that dismal winter of Lafayette, of
Knox, Stirling, and others substantial structures of
stone that bid fair to last for many generations yet.
While looking about over here I met a man trudging
along smoking his pipe. He wore an overcoat dyed the
color of rust by long exposure to the sun and weather,
and under his arm he carried a bag. I made some
inquiry about the road, but he could not help me.
He said he did not often come up this way. His
tramping ground lay more to the south. All the
farmers there knew him and let him sleep in their
io New England and its Neighbors
barns. He made a business of gathering water-cresses
in the brooks, but they had been all frozen by recent cold
weather, and he could get none to fill his bag to-day.
I at length took a byway leading toward the heights,
and soon was in the brushy woods, where I found the
snow lying six or eight inches deep. As I approached
the summit of the hills I came on the old-time intrench-
ments skirting around the crest of the ridges. They
were not imposing, yet they were clearly marked a
ditch, and, behind it, a low, flattened embankment with
a path along the top kept well trodden by sightseers.
I followed this sinuous line whitened by the snow for
some distance. The hilltop was very silent. At times
I heard the cheerful twitter of the chickadees, and once
a hound came baying through the trees, with his nose
to the ground, zigzagging after a rabbit track. A hawk
circled high overhead and turned its head sidewise to
get a look at me, and somewhere down in the Valley a
bevy of crows were cawing.
A little below the intrenchments were the heavy
earthwork squares of two forts, one commanding the
approaches from the south, the other from the east.
An outer line of intrenchments was thrown up about a
mile from those on the hills ; but they lay through the
cultivated farm fields and have long ago disappeared.
Between the two lines of earthworks the main army
was stationed, and there the soldiers put up their little
log huts. On the bleak December days while these
Midwinter in Valley Forge n
were building and the work of fortifying was going on,
the troops had no shelter save their tents. The huts
were sixteen feet long, fourteen wide, and six and one-
half high. They were banked up outside with earth,
and the cracks between the logs were chinked with
clay, while the roofs were of logs split into rude planks
or slabs. The buildings were regularly arranged in
streets, and each was the home of twelve men.
Every cabin had at one end a fireplace of clay-
daubed logs, but, with the bare earth floor underfoot,
comfort must have been well-nigh impossible. Besides,
the winter is reputed to have been uncommonly cold
and snowy, and the men were very inadequately clothed
and fed. Sometimes they were without meat, some
times even lacked bread. Disease, too, was rampant,
and smallpox ravaged the camp. Privation made the
troops mutinous, and at times it seemed as if " in all
human probability the army must dissolve," and the
actual strength of the army was reduced to barely four
thousand who could be depended on for service. Wash
ington affirmed on December ajd that over twenty-nine
hundred men were ineffective " because they are bare
foot and otherwise unfit for duty." Scarcity of blankets,
he says, compels numbers to " sit up all night by fires,
instead of taking comfortable rest in the natural way."
A congressional committee which visited the camp
reported that many lives were sacrificed for want of
straw or other materials to raise the men when they
12 New England and its Neighbors
slept from the cold and wet earth. The horses died
of starvation, and the men themselves often had to do
the work of beasts of burden, with improvised hand
carts or carrying heavy loads on their backs. The
dilapidated soldiery were as badly off with regard to
firearms as they were in other respects. Some would
have muskets, while others in the same company
had carbines, fowling-pieces, and rifles. These were
covered with rust, half of them without bayonets,
and many from which not a single shot could be fired.
Frequently the men carried their powder in tin boxes
and cow-horns instead of in the regulation pouches.
The condition of the army was primarily due to the
feebleness of the Union of States and the lack of power
on the part of Congress to levy taxes or to enforce its
edicts. The states were jealous of each other, and
there was fear that the army would assume control of
the country if it was allowed too much power. Yet,
even so, the hardships of the troops were not all a
necessity. Incompetence, as usual, played its part in
the commissary department ; there were supplies in
plenty, it is said, but they were in the wrong place, and
often Washington could only obtain food by foraging
fer and wide through the country round about. Many
of the formers were hostile, and, to save their grain
from seizure, they stored it away unthreshed in sheaves.
If it was to be confiscated, the soldiers themselves must
wield the flail.
Midwinter in Valley Forge 13
The millers were equally perverse, and in one in
stance a lot of glass was ground into the flour. An
investigation followed, and it was decided that the
person guilty of this mischief was a Quaker Tory by
,the name of Roberts. A detail of troops was sent to
his mill, and they hanged him in his orchard.
The Valley Forge encampment was virtually at
Philadelphia s back door, and an easy road along the
The Schuylkill at Valley Forge
banks of the Schuylkill led directly to the city. Yet
the British army, fifteen or twenty thousand strong,
stayed revelling in the town all through the winter and
spring. The only excuse offered is that no spy ever
got into the American camp or, if he did, he never
succeeded in returning, and the English did not know
their enemies weakness. Perhaps, too, they got an
14 New England and its Neighbors
exaggerated idea of the wildness of the country up the
Schuylkill from the names of some of the river villages
that intervened between them and the patriots strong
hold Monayunk and Conshohocken, for instance.
In the evening after my first day s tramping I visited
the Valley Forge post-office. It occupied a corner in
a genuine country store. The ceiling of this emporium
was low and dingy, the counters rude, and the shelves
were piled full of a most varied assortment of goods.
Posters hung here and there advertising plug tobacco
and other wares, or announcing prospective auctions of
the region. Of course the stove in the centre of the
room was hedged around with men smoking and ab
sorbing opinions and news from one another. Their
clatter was going full tilt when I came in, but at once
subsided into mild-voiced and occasional remarks. I
sat down at some remove from them to write a letter,
and they gradually recovered.
All but one of the men had their hats on. The
exception was a thin, elderly man who wore slippers
and was apparently a .part of the store. The others
addressed him as " Unele Buxton." He was actual
uncle to the postmaster, I believe, and adopted uncle
to the rest of the community. I noticed presently
that he was speaking about a well he was having dug,
and was complaining that the diggers did " a good bit
o torkin , but mighty little work."
" I reckon it s too near the road," commented the
Midwinter in Valley Forge 15
man at Uncle Buxton s right. "Y* see every one
gain along has to stop V ask all about it and tell
what they think on t."
" Henry Shaw s sick again/ remarked a man in a
fur cap, who had established himself conveniently near
the box full of sawdust that served as a spittoon.
" What s he got this time ? " some one inquired.
" They say it s pneumonia."
" That there s what they used to call inflammation of
the lungs/ Uncle Buxton declared.
" About all the diseases hev changed names since I
was a boy," said the man in the fur cap, shifting his
quid.
" That s so," assented Uncle Buxton. " I was up
to my niece s week afore last and I was coughin* some
and she says, c Why, Uncle Buxton, you ve got the
" c No, I ain t ! says L
cc Yes, you have ! says she.
ccc No, I ain t, I says, c l ve got a bad cold, but I
ain t got no grip. It s just a bad cold, same as I had
when I was a boy. But if you have a bad cold now,
people call it the grip."
" And if you hev the grip now," said the fur-capped
man, " they think they got to send right off for a medi
cal doctor. Why, when I was a boy, my mother used
to doctor us never thought of runnin to a profes
sional for every little thing. My mother used to
1 6 New England and its Neighbors
always every year pick St. John s-wort and life-ever-
lastin , horse-mint, penny-r y l V such things in the
pastures, and we had sage V horehound growin in the
garden."
" Any one that understands the herbs knows more
than the doctors that s my idee," said a man who
was addressed by his companions as Jerry.
" Yes, and you c n often cure yourself a good many
times," affirmed Uncle Buxton, " if you only have a
min to. Gorry ! I know I used to have the sore
throat had it all the time and 1 1 was a great coffee
drinker them days drank it every meal, n I thought
I d stop. So I did, n my sore throat got well, V a
while after mother said to me, c Albert, won t you have
a cup o* coffee ? I got some all made up fresh ; n I
said I didn t care if I did ; n the next mornin I had my
sore throat again ; n then I decided if twas a question
between sore throat and coffee I d give up the coffee.
So I give it up, n that was thirty years ago, n I ain t
drank a cup of coffee since,"
"I make my own spring medicine," said Jerry
" costs me just ten cents. I buy that much worth o*
cream o 1 tartar and stir up a spoonful with a little sugar
in a tumbler o* water every mornin before breakfast
It makes a good drink about like soda-water."
" I got a good receipt for a cough," Uncle Buxton
said, * of the woman in at the bakery down at Con-
shohocken. She s given that receipt to lots o* folks,
Midwinter in Valley Forge 17
and Td heard of it before I went down there. I had
a very bad cough and people here said I was consump
tive. My brother was always at me to go to a doctor,
but I said I didn t want no doctor, and one day I was
in Conshohocken and I went into the bakery and got
that receipt. It was half a pint o white wine vinegar,
half a pound o rock candy, and two fresh-laid eggs.
You stewed em-up together into a kind of syrup, thick
like jelly. Well, I took half the quantity o vinegar
and rock candy and one fresh-laid egg and made a jelly,
and gin I had used that I was better, and before that I
was gettin worse all the time ; and then I fixed up the
rest, and that cured me/
"You couldn t a got cured less n twenty-five
dollars if you d gone to a medical doctor," said Jerry.
" Well, I don t begrudge the doctor his money if he
cures," remarked the man in the fur cap, " but if he
don t cure, it comes kind o tough."
When I rose to go I glanced at the auction posters
once more. It occurred to me I might attend one of
the sales if the distance was not too great. " Where is
this Wednesday auction to be ? " I asked.
"That s the one at Howltown, ain t it?" queried
some one in the group about the stove.
" No," put in Uncle Buxton ; "that s four miles from
here, over at Di mond Rock."
" Diamond Rock," I repeated, " how does it get
that name ? "
1 8 New England and its Neighbors
"Why, this ere rock s full o little di monds,"
responded Uncle Buxton "crystals, you know.
There s small holes all over the rock, and you can look
in and see the di monds shinin there, plenty of em.
Folks go with hammers and knock em out, so the
rock is pretty well chipped now."
" Will any of these mills at Valley Forge ever be
used again ? " I inquired, changing the -subject.
" I don t know, indeed," was Uncle Buxton s reply.
" They ain t improvin none. That one by the depot
is the worst. It s all goin to wrack, and the top story s
fell off; but it s nothing like as old as the other two
mills. The upper mill on the crick was a cotton and
woollen mill and has got a good water-power and a
good dam. The old dam washed out in 1865. There
was a cloudburst up the valley, and the water riz way
over the banks, roarin an rushin along full of deb-ris
and carrying away all the bridges, and dams, and every
thing. Since the mills all closed, Valley Forge s been
kind o 1 a run-down place ; and then, last year, there
was a minister made us some more trouble/*
" How was that ? " I asked.
" Why, we was goin* to have a Baptist church built.
The minister collected the money, and then he spent it
himself. He was found out and had to leave. Now
he s up at Perkiomen runnin the streets that s about
all he s doin s far s I c n find out"
"Do you think," said I, "that Washington s
A VALLEY FORGE FOOTPATH
The ruinous buildings are the former homes of the operatives who worked In tne
deserted village mills
Midwinter in Valley Forge 19
soldiers had as hard a time here as we read they
did ? "
"Yes," replied Uncle Buxton, decidedly, "I do.
There s a colored woman lives in Philadelphia, and
she s a hundred and thirty years old, and when she was
a girl she was owned out near here by a family named
Huston, and the soldiers was so bad off Mr. Huston
used to go round gathering up stuff to give em ; and
the colored woman she was a little girl then went
up to the camp with him sometimes, and she says the
soldiers shoes was all worn out, and she could track
em around on the snow by the blood from their feet.
My grandfather was with the Vermont troops, and I ve
heard him tell, too, how things was, many a time. He
said one cold spell Washington appinted a dress parade,
and he asked the soldiers to all put on their best
clothes and look just the finest they could. They did
it, and then he had all them picked out that was com
fortable dressed and set em to work choppin* wood.
The rest he had stay in their huts to keep warm. If
people was to go through the hardships o that winter
now, they d all die. They ain t got the spunk they had
then nowhere near ! "
On one other point I asked enlightenment. I had
failed to find what was known as the Washington
spring, though I had searched for it again and again.
" It s close by the place where the old forge stood/*
explained Uncle Buxton, " in a bar l right by the side
o the road," and he gave minute directions.
2O New England and its Neighbors
I renewed my search the next day, and was rewarded
by finding a few rotten staves around a hole in the
gutter, full of leaves and rubbish, and not a drop of
water. The natives, to whom I afterward mentioned
these conditions, apologized for the spring by saying
they had never known it to go dry before. Its claim
to be the " Washington " spring does not seem to be
very valid. The same claim is made for nearly all the
springs in the Valley, including two or three the rail
road has wiped out. But surely Washington would
not have depended on this spring a half-mile distant
from headquarters when there were plenty nearer.
The old Potts house, in which Washington made
his home, is a square, good-sized stone building, two
and a half stories high. A public association has it in
charge, and preserves it as nearly as may be in its
Revolutionary aspect. Its most pleasing outward
feature is the great front door, divided horizontally in
halves, after the manner common in colonial days, and
shadowed by a picturesque porch roof that pokes out
from the wall above. The windows are guarded by
solid wooden shutters, and the glass in their tiny panes
is only semi-transparent, and distorts with its twists and
curls whatever is seen through it.
The rooms within have their ancient open fireplaces
and white, wooden wainscoting, and contain a variety
of old-time relics, yet there is no touch of life, and the
house has the barren look of a museum. This is the
Midwinter in Valley Forge
21
The Entrance to the Headquarters Mansion
more pronounced because of certain barriers it has been
necessary to put up to restrain the vandalism of the
sightseers. Even the great kitchen fireplace has to be
protected. It was kept open until it had gradually
22 New England and its Neighbors
lost every piece of ironware it contained, and then,
when a new set of old furnishings was presented, a
wire screen was run across the front.
The visitors treat the place as their prey to a sur
prising degree. Frequently they attempt to avoid
paying the ten-cent admission fee. At the rear are
spacious grounds of lawn and shade trees, the whole
surrounded by a weatherworn picket fence. Over this
fence comes many a pilgrim, but sometimes these inter
lopers get their just deserts, as, for example, a party of
eight young women who scaled the palings one day
when they thought the keeper was at dinner. He
suddenly confronted them, much to their consternation,
and in spite of their pleadings, made them all clamber
over the fence again and come around to the gate.
One very interesting portion of the house is a low
log annex which reproduces a like structure erected by
Washington fora dining-room. In its floor is a trap
door, and a steep flight of steps leads down to an
arched passage and room underground. The house
was built when the Indians were still feared, and this
retreat was to serve as a refuge in case the house-
* dwellers were hard pressed. A tunnel originally gave
connection with the near river, whence escape could be
made by boat.
Many schemes are broached for improving Valley
Forge as a Revolutionary shrine, some good, but others
of doubtful wisdom. The danger is of making it a
Midwinter in Valley Forge
23
great show place ; for, laid out as a park and adorned
with ostentatious monuments, its tinge of wildness
would be destroyed, and it would wholly lose its charm
and all flavor of the old war days w r hen it was a refuge
for the feeble and tattered Continental army.
The House which was Washington s Headquarters
II
WHEN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS ARE WHITE
THE southern
half of New
England was
bare and brown ; but
as I went northward I
began to see remnants
of drifts, and there
were upper hillslopes
with a northern ex
posure that were quite
white. By the time
I reached the moun
tains snow was omni
present,, the roads were
deep-buried, and trav-
- i. ~~ - elling was done on
A Woodland Teamster runners. My train
carried me many miles up the tortuous valleys, and
the aspect of the region became less and less inviting
the longer the journey continued. The little farms
24
When the White Mountains are White 25
appeared unthrifty, and the frequent, great vacant
hotels only accented the desolation.
I stopped at a village I will call Maple Glen. Like
most of the hamlets of the district it consisted of a
small group of houses around the railway station, with
scattered farmhouses on the roads leading away from
this nucleus. It looked lost or misplaced in the white
world of frost with which it was enveloped. One
doubted if it would thaw out in all summer. Many of
the dwellings were meagre little affairs with a few
pinched sheds about them. These were the homes
of the unenergetic or shiftless. Their dreariness was
not due to the poverty of the region and its remote
ness -from markets, for signs were not lacking that
some degree of prosperity was within the reach of
all. A portion of the inhabitants grasped it, as was
evidenced by buildings repaired and modernized and
made pleasing to the owner s eyes by the application
of paint in the striking colors that are at present fash
ionable. The hotels furnish excellent markets during
the s"ummer for eggs, poultry, milk, and early vege
tables, and considerable work is to be had at the
sawmills which abound along all the streams, while in
winter good wages can be earned chopping and teaming
on the mountains.
I looked about the village and then went into the
station to warm up by the fire. Several men were
lounging about there, and two or three others entered
26 New England and its Neighbors
soon afterward. One of the latter was an old-fashioned
Yankee. He shook hands cordially with an elderly
man who seemed to be a particular friend, and said,
cc Haow dew yeow pan aout tewday ? "
His pronunciation was not a fair sample, however, of
the conversation I heard in the mountains. On the
whole the people used surprisingly good English, and
the nasal twang supposed to be characteristic of rustic
New Englanders was seldom very marked.
In a corner of the station waiting-room stood a crate
of oranges. It had come by express. for the local store
keeper. One of the men in the room presently called
attention to it and told how fond he was of oranges
and named just the length of time it would take him
to devour a dozen of them. Another man said there
wasn t enough taste to oranges to suit him, but he could
eat lemons right down. This led a third man to relate
that while he didn t have any great hankering for either
oranges or lemons, he could despatch sixteen bananas
without stopping to breathe. Then a fourth epicure
declared nothing suited him as well as peanuts. <( I
golly ! " he exclaimed, " I c*n walk from here to Lit
tleton, and that s ten miles, and eat peanuts all the
way."
What other gastronomic revelations might have been
made I cannot say, for just then we were all attracted to
the windows by a commotion outside. Two drunkea
fellows were walking along the road, jarring against each
-^
A LOAD OF LOGS ON A FOREST ROADWAY
When the White Mountains are White 27
other and gesticulating and shouting. The older of the
two, who looked to be about twenty-five, was Joe But
ton, so the men in the station said, and added that he
had married, some months before, Eliza Hicks, a girl
of thirteen ; yet the match was on the whole perhaps
a good thing for her, it was argued, as her parents were
dead and there was no one to take care of her. The
couple were reported to get along well together in spite
of her youth and his drunkenness. " But my daughter
used to go to school with her," commented the man
standing next me, " and she says Eliza puts on terrible
airs over her and the other girls now, because she s
married and they ain t. The girls pretend not to care,
but I guess they feel it some."
Evening was approaching and I inquired where I
could get lodging for the night. My only chance, I
was told, was at a boarding-house a little way up the
track. This boarding-house proved to be a small yel
low dwelling neighboring a sawmill. It was kept by a
stout, shrewd-looking Frenchwoman. She had only two
or three boarders just then, for the mill was not running,
and I was welcome to stay if I chose. The house was
very plainly and rudely furnished, but was clean and
orderly. I sat down in the kitchen. In a chair near
me was a large framed portrait that had apparently just
been unwrapped. The woman said it was a crayon
enlargement of her mother, and she thought it was very
good, but she would never get another. " It is too
28 New England and its Neighbors
much troubles. The man he comes here long time
ago and he say he make portrait my mother free if I
buy the frame the portrait, it cost nothings. I say
I will take the portrait for nothings and never mind
the frame, but he say he not do business that way. So
I pick a frame and he say he want cash. I say how I
know you ever be here another time. I pay you when
you the picture brings. But he tell it large expense for
the very fine work he do and he must have moneys.
I say then I will pay him two dollars and no more,
and he say very well. So I have only but a ten-dollar
bill and I ask him can he change it and he say he can.
But when he get it he take out the full price and I
cannot make him do different. He say it is the price
only of the frame anyway and a great bargains. I pay
four dollars eighty-five for that frame, but I have see
just as big a frame at Lancaster in a store for dollar
twenty-nine, and my sister s husband he get portrait
like this made large thrown in with a suit clothes. It
not so great bargain, I think.
" Well, that agent man, he get my money and it be
long time until I think I never see him no more, but
to-day he come, and he say they put some extra works
on the picture and express, so I have to pay one ninety
more. But I say I never order no extras, and they
bring themselves the picture, so there be no express,
and I have pay all I will. So we have some talks, and
he goes away. Oh, we have many pedlers comin along
When the White Mountains are White -29
here all the times, and tramps too. Some of the tramps
make me afraid. I always give them to eat; but if
they looks bad or like they was drunk, I keeps shut
the door and put somethings in paper, and opens the
door only enough to hand it out. One Sunday, a
big fat tramp came. All the mans was in the house
my boarders fifteen mans and I was not
scare that time. It was mos dinner, and I say, < You
have to wait. If there anythings left I give you, but
I got only jus bout nough to fill my boarders. He
say he in considerable hurry, so he go on some other
house.
" I was most scare once that I was cleaning the but
tery and a tramp he came right into the buttery and
say, e I want some kind o grub.
" And I say, c Why you not knock ?
Cf And he say he see nothing of nobody and the door
open, so he walk in. I been churning and I have six
poun butter and have just put it on the shelf, and he
say he guess he have a little o that butter ; and I take
a knife to cut, and he say he don t min to have a
whole cake two poun . Then he say he will have
some tea and some sugar, and he take two breads and
other things ; he look awful bad, and I so much fright
I do all he say ; and he see a dinner pail all new and
shiny, and he say, c I take that, too ; that be kind o*
handy for me/ But I tell him that belong to my
boarder I can t give you that ; and he say he bliged
30 New England and its Neighbors
to have it and he settle with the boarder when he
come aroun* nex . But I guess that be not very soon,
and I not want to see him anyway ; he too terrible
After supper when my landlady had finished, doing
the dishes and had sat down to sew, we heard a rat in
the walls. That reminded her of a chopper who
several years ago came to the house to board a few
days after he got through the winter in the woods,
" and he say he can make the rats go just where he
please send them any place he want; and I say,
c You a nice man doin such things!
" But he say, c That s all right. It come very handy
knowing to do that sometimes ; and I tell him I don t
think much of man sending rats round. Well, he been
long time in camp, and his clothes much dirty, and he
want me to wash for him, and I say, c No, you hire
some other people what does washing here. But he
was a Frenchman and didn t want to spend nothings
these French, they come from Canada, you know, and
they brings eveiything they will need and don t want
to spen one cent. They want to take they money all
back to Canada. Then he ask will I let him do the
wash, and so I did.
" When he ready to go home an* we settle, he don t
want pay fifty cent a day, and he say, f You wouldn t
charge so much to a poor workingman, and I say, c I
would. You heat enough for two mans together, and
When the White Mountains are White 31
I got have the price what I always have. He want to
pay twenty-five cents, but I won t take only my reg Iar
price.
" So he went away, and that same day a lot of railway
mens come, and the house was full up ; and in the night
we could not none of us sleep, the rats made so much
noise. It was like any one move a trunk and throw a
table on the floor make jus as much noise as that
and no one believe that was rats. The boarders, they
want know the next morning if we hear that terrible
noise that scratch and bang and they ask if we
have ghosts. We never hear any rats before and we
think that Frenchman, he go away mad and he mus
make the rats of all the peoples round here corne
down our place. We didn t have no cat. Every cat
we use to have would get fits, and some day we find
it turnin round and grab on the wall and fall on the
floor; and we think the cat might jump up on the
cradle and scratch the baby, and we get frightened
when the cat have fits, and we kill all the time. One
of the boarder, he say he heard if you steal a cat, it
keep well and never have that sickness same what all
the before cats had. So I say, * If you to steal a cat
have a chance, I wish you to goodness would.
"He kind of keep lookout for cats that day and he
found one on the sidewalk bout two mile from here ;
and the boarders say we fed those other cats too much
meatj so we didn t any more, and we had that cat eight
32 . New England and its Neighbors
or nine years and we got it yet. Soon as we got it
that cat begun catch rats. It catch mos as fifteen a
day and it wouldn t never eat that rats once. It catch
them all night and it not through catching the next
morning, but it so tired then it would not kill, but
bring them to the kitchen and leave them run round,
and we have to take the broom. That make the
boarders laugh.
"The next fall that Frenchman come again. It
mos night, and he go to the barn, but I know him as
he pass the window. My husband he milking and he
not in the dark remember the man. If he have he
take a stick and break his neck. The man he ask if
he can get board, and my husband he say, c My wife
manage all that. So the man come and ask me. He
have a bag on his back and it been rain hard and he
all wet. He say he can t go any farther; and I say,
* You the man what send the rats any place you want
to. We got lots of rats that night you left. I guess
you got you bag full of rats again. No, I not keep
you/
"He never sayed anythings, but jus walk away
down the road."
At the conclusion of this tale my landlady brought
from the cellar some potatoes to pare for breakfast,
and shortly her lodgers, who had been spending the
evening at the village store, came in, and then it was
bedtime for the household.
WORK AT A LOGGING CAMP LANDING
When the White Mountains are White 33
After an early meal the next morning I returned to
the station, where I found a log train preparing to
make its daily journey back on a little branch road
into the mountains. I decided to go with it and
climbed into the rude caboose at its rear. There were
about half a dozen other passengers. They visited and
joked and added vigor and spice to their conversation
by a good deal of casual swearing and some decidedly
less excusable foulness. Our journey was up a wind
ing valley, all the way through the interminable and
silent woods. Considerable snow had fallen during
the night, but it lay light and undrifted and did not
materially impede our progress, though the steepness
of the grade made the engine pant heavily. The
flakes were still flying, and I could only see a little
strip of whitened woodland on either side, and nothing
at all of the mountains between which we were passing.
I went as far as the train went, to the most remote
of the logging camps that of Jacques Freneau in
the very heart of the woods. The camp was in a
clearing beside the tracks. It consisted of a group of
several buildings and an eighth of a mile of " landing"
to which the logs were drawn fiom the forest, and
from which they were rolled on to the platform cars.
With the exception of one or two little shanties of
boards the camp buildings were of logs made weather
proof by having their cracks chinked with moss.
Their rude construction and the lonely winter forest
34 New England and its Neighbors
that formed their background made them seem exceed
ingly primitive and out-of-the-world.
Freneau s choppers numbered about fifty. They
were not making a clean sweep of the forest, but only
taking out the spruces and pines, so that they left
woodland behind, though a good deal thinned and
devastated. To see the wilderness changed to the
desert I would have to go up another valley where
the " king contractor " of the mountains was at work.
He employed seven hundred laborers and had built
for them a whole village of houses laid out regularly
in streets. The mountains when he finished were
shorn of everything but brush, and invited the farther
despoiling of fire and storm, so that it seemed doubtful
if the forest glory of which the heights had been robbed
could ever return.
A well-worn road led back from Freneau s camp
into the woods, and I followed it until I found the
choppers. They were working in genuine forest that
looked like the undisturbed handiwork of nature, and
the trees grew crowded and stalwart. In the past these
trees, when they waxed old, had added their forms to
the ancestral mould among the rocks where they had
stood. But now blows of axes and the grating of
sharp-toothed saws were heard among them ; and those
tiny creatures those destroying mites known as men
were bringing them down untimely in youth and
sturdy prime and dragging them away.
When the White Mountains are White 35
The men sawed off the larger trees, but used their
axes for the lesser ones. They usually chopped two
to a tree, from opposite sides, and I noticed they could
work equally well right or left handed. When a tree
is about to fall,
the choppers at its
base shout to warn
such of their com
panions as are near.
At first the tree
sways from the up
right very gently,
and a little snow
sifts down from its
branches. Then
its motion becomes
more and more
rapid until it crashes
to earth. The im
pact causes a great
cloud of powdered
snow to burst up
like smoke into
the air. This slowly drifts away, and by the time it
dissipates, the men are working along the prostrate
tree trunk, cutting off the branches.
The woodsmen are portioned into crews of four
two choppers, a driver, and a sled-tender. It is the
The Choppers
3 6 New England and its Neighbors
duty of the last-named to help the driver load, and
while the team is making a trip he is busy rolling logs
to the road ready for his companion s return. The
driver has a single broad sled truck. To this the logs
are chained, allowing the rear ends to drag. These
ends furrow very smooth and hard tracks, which you
have to tread most gingerly or your feet fly from under
you with astonishing suddenness. The loads go skim
ming along the decline at a trot, and in a few minutes
are at the landing, where are men who unchain the logs
and load them on the cars.
. A good deal of rivalry exists between the different
crews, and they are always eager to compare records
when these are made up in the evening. They work
with especial ardor on Saturdays, for it is quite an
honor to come out ahead in the week s total. The
boss does all he can to cherish this rivalry, and some
times offers prizes perhaps two plugs of tobacco to
the crew which accomplishes most in a day, and one
plug to each of the three crews which come next.
The logs were marked and a record of them kept by
two sealers. The sealers were the aristocracy of the
camp, and had a separate cabin of their own. In it,
besides the inevitable box stove and a big wood-box,
each man had a board desk roughly nailed together
and fastened to the wall, and an equally rude bed.
Not much factory-made furniture is imported into the
camps. The woodsmen get along with what they can
When the White Mountains are White 37
construct themselves. Instead of chairs they use
benches, though the sealers had been inventive enough
to supply a rocking-chair for their cabin. The main
A Woodsman s Rocking-chair
substance of this article was a flour barrel with a por
tion of the staves sawed off and inserted for a seat.
On the bottom were nailed a few short lengths of
boards to form a platform, underneath which were fast
ened edgewise a couple of boards fashioned into rock
ers. I tried the chair and found it more comfortable
than I would have imagined, though its makers apolo
gized for its lack of upholstering, and for certain nails
that were apt to restrain you when you rose.
The man who was chiefly responsible for this chair
was a very ingenious sort of a Yankee. Among other
38 New England and its Neighbors
things he had whittled out a birch broom, and each
winter he was in the habit of making with his jack-
knife quite a number of slender toy barrels, about six
inches high, which he filled with gum and sold
some of them to workers in the logging camp who
wanted to send away a forest souvenir, some of them
to chance visitors. The barrels were very neatly done
in white poplar wood, and were marvels of patience.
Camp visitors were usually either pedlers or people
from the mountain villages who came on some sort of
business. Possibly on a Sunday a priest or a Protes
tant home missionary might find his way to the camp and
hold service, but none had been to Freneau s this winter,
and the only manifestation of religion was the regular ap
pearance of salt codfish on Fridays. One of the most
recent of the pedlers was a man who took orders for
tailor-made suits. His prices ranged from thirteen to
twenty-two dollars, and he did very well ; but a fellow
with watches and jewellery was much more successful.
In a single night he sold one hundred and seventy-five
dollars worth. The pedlers received payment in the
form of orders on the boss, who deducted ten per cent
for his share in the transaction.
Nearly all the men in Freneau s camp were French
from Canada. They cleared from fifty to one hundred
dollars by their winter s work on wages varying from
seventeen to thirty dollars a month, the sum depend
ing on the individual s ability and the work he did.
When the White Mountains are White 39
The men were all young, and they seldom came more
than two or three seasons. The probability was they
were struggling to pay for some little farm that cost
about a hundred and fifty dollars, and when this was
accomplished they stayed at home to take care of their
property. There was rarely any loitering on the part
of these Frenchmen after the labor of the four white
months in the forest solitude was done. They started
promptly northward with their earnings almost intact ;
but the Irish and Scotch from Nova Scotia, who made
up a considerable fraction of the mountain choppers,
were apt to celebrate their release and affluence by a
grand spree.
In Freneau s stout log barn were twenty-six horses.
He had no oxen. Indeed, the latter are scarcely ever
brought into the mountains now. Some of the valley
farmers have them and get out lumber from the wood
land borders with them ; but twenty years ago they
were in common use everywhere, both in the forest and
out. It was thought then that oxen could do rougher
work than horses. The present view is that horses can
be put in places where oxen cannot, and their superior
intelligence and quickness make them accomplish
decidedly more. The only oxen I learned of in the
woods were two yoke in a camp a mile below. Their
owner was an old-style farmer who was getting timber
from his own land. He had a tremendous voice, and
on a quiet day could be clearly heard by the men at
40 New England and its Neighbors
A Mountain Ox-team
Freneau s, shouting to his creatures, u Gee off there !
Whoa, back ! Whoa, hush ! Whoa, ho ! " etc.
The power of his tones suggested a man hardly less
bucolic than the creatures he was directing. I con
cluded I would go down to see him. During the
winter he had employed several choppers, but these
had now gone, and only he, and his wife who did the
camp housekeeping in the little log cabin, and their
son were left. When I approached the clearing I saw
that father and son were engaged in loading a car, and
were about to put on a long spruce. This was in
a pile three or four rods up an incline from the land
ing, and they were considering whether it would go
When the White Mountains are White 41
where it ought if they simply let it roll. With
very little trouble they could have set up stakes to
stop it on the lower side of the landing, but they
guessed it would go all right, and heaved it loose.
Off it went, bumping along, and the men watched it
with interest. One end gained on the other, and when
it struck the car it only partially lodged on the load,
and canted up with the small end down on the track.
The men were inclined to blame each other for this
outcome, but they soon fell to work again, got their
yoke of oxen hitched on to the log, and after con
siderable trouble succeeded in properly adjusting it.
Next they dragged a heavy beech out of the snow on
the edge of the woods. It was rather short for the
landing, and they were half minded to lay down some
skids to make sure it should not go astray. But when
they talked this over they guessed it wasn t necessary.
" Seems to me it ll do," said the old man ; " only be
careful ; yes, be darn careful ! " They edged the log
along, and so far as I could judge they were " darn
careful," and yet at the last moment down went one
end between the car and the landing. Luckily the
other end caught up above. Even so it was a bad
predicament, and the men hitched on the oxen with
the remark that if one yoke couldn t draw the log out
they would bring their second yoke from the barn and
see what both together could do. But a single yoke
sufficed, though not without a great deal of exertion on
42 New England and its Neighbors
the part of men and beasts, and a melancholy waste
of time. There was little pleasure in watching such
awkward work, and I soon retraced my steps to
Freneau s, where things were not done by haphazard
guesswork.
Evening was now approaching, and I went into the
lodging-house. The entrance opened on a low, dark
apartment which was called the bar-room, though there
was no bar, and no liquors were sold in the camp. Its
correspondence to its name lay in its being the men s
loafing-place when they were not at work. In one
corner was a long sink, with a barrel close by into
which excellent water flowed from a spring up the hill.
A cracked box-stove stood in the centre of the room,
and there was a big grindstone near a window, and
several rude benches against the walls. The dining
room adjoined. It was nearly filled by four long
tables. Separated from it by a slight partition was the
office of the camp, serving also as a storeroom and
retail shop a small, narrow room with a box nailed
against the wall for a desk, and many shelves piled with
gatherings of all kinds. Here were axes, chains, rope,
parts of harness, and a supply of old periodicals pre
sented by some religious society. Then there were
socks, mittens, overalls, and undershirts for sale, and,
in the way of luxuries, plug tobacco, of which the men
consumed great quantities.
When it began to grow dark the workers came
When the White Mountains are White 43
trooping in to supper, and, that disposed of, adjourned
to the bar-room to spend the evening lounging and
smoking. They enjoyed the heat and the relaxation,,
and I suppose did not mind the gloom, only slightly
mitigated by a single lamp and stray gleams from the
cracks of the stove. At nine we all went upstairs to the
loft where we were
to sleep. This loft
was even more
barnlike than the
rest of the house.
Onthe floor around
the room borders
was a row of bunks,
and above these
was another row,
all made of boards
and furnished with
straw mattresses
and coarse blankets.
The men did not
disrobe much, save
to take ofF their
jackets and shoes,
and soon the dim In rhe slee P in S Apartment
lamp which had furnished us with light was extinguished
and the scattering talk lapsed into silence. Yet there
would still be an occasional cough, or some one would
44 New England and its Neighbors
rise on his elbow to spit on the floor. These mani
festations of wakefulness also ceased presently, and no
sound could be heard save the heavy breathing of the
sleepers. I did not drop off as readily as the others ;
for the situation was new to me, and the bed was too
densely saturated with stale tobacco fumes that had
been accumulating all winter; and, besides, I had the
fancy I might be attacked by crawlers. My concern
on this score proved needless, and when I finally slept
I was awakened only once. That was about midnight.
One of the men was singing in his sleep, and he went
leisurely and melodiously through a long ballad in
French.
Morning was welcome, and I was up with the first
risers and went down to the kitchen a commodious
lean-to immediately beyond the dining room. The
work there was done by a little old German and his
wife assisted by a boy. Around the walls were shelves
and broad counters, and everywhere were boxes and
barrels of supplies, piles of tin tableware, pots and pans,
and tubs and kettles ; and a trap-door in the floor gave
access to an excavation in which were stored potatoes.
The cooking was done on a great flat stove.
During the winter the fifty men consumed a barrel
of flour each, sixty bushels of beans, two hundred
bushels of potatoes, seven hundred pounds of oleo
margarine, one hundred pounds of tea, and a vast
amount of meat and fish. There was almost no varia-
When the White Mountains are White 45
tion in the daily fare, except that on Friday salt codfish
was substituted for meat. Bread, butter, tea, and mo
lasses appeared on the table at every meal. The tea
was not very strong, but it was unlimited in quantity,
and it was kept long enough on the stove to acquire
plenty of color. It was served without milk or sugar.
Sugar was formerly supplied, but the men were waste
ful, put in half a dozen spoonfuls or more and left the
bottom of their cups covered with half-dissolved crystals
after they had drank the tea. They seemed to have
a particular fondness for molasses, and hardly a man
failed, three times a day, to pour on his tin plate a
generous puddle in which he proceeded to sop his
bread.
Beans and brown bread were the breakfast staples,
but these as served at Freneau s were not considered
first-class, for they were baked in the stove oven.
Most camps have a bean-hole an excavation three
or four feet deep in the ground just outside the log
dwelling. A fire is built in it, and when the wood is
reduced to a great heap of coals the bean-pot is put in
with some tins of brown bread on top. Then the pot
is covered with coals, and ashes and earth are heaped on.
It is left thus through the night, to be exhumed the
following morning, and the woodsmen all agree that
bean-hole beans are far superior to the oven product.
At noon Freneau s men had potatoes and boiled
meat. The meat was usually beef, but occasionally
46 New England and its Neighbors
was fresh pork. For supper the meat and potatoes were
served again, this time chopped into lumps and mixed
together. Dough
nuts appeared on
the table morning
and noon, and
cookies at night.
I was told that
this fare as com
pared with what
the Canadian
French had at
home was para
dise; but it was
a good deal hum
bler than that in
the average of the
camps, and sto
ries were related
of Yankee camps
where they had
steaks and "ham,
cake, bread, and
raisin pudding,
-, and two or three
A Corner of the Camp Kitchen i i r
kinds or pie.
I wondered that those two old people in Freneau s
kitchen could care for their large household. They
When the White Mountains are White 47
looked to be about seventy years of age. Both were
thin and gray, the man crooked and stooping, the
woman wrinkled but upright. They worked hard and
made long days.
" I gets up at three o clock every morning from dot
bed," said the man, pointing to a rude couch in a far
corner, " and I have on my underclothes and nightcap,
and I don t stop not to put on nothings more but my
rubber boots, and then I makes to start the fires here
and in the next room and in the bar-room, and about
in twenty minutes I get them all roar.
"Then my wife she get up, and we begin get
breakfast. The boy what is suppose to help, we not
see him until one-two hour later. He like an old man
he so careful of hisself. He would be kill to get up
like me. We have the breakfast at half-past five, but
these las few week it is not so soon, for the men they
get not up when I rings the bell. They work like a
tiger when they come at the begin of winter, but now
they have got kind o balky and will not to hurry.
" These French, they are as more like cattle as any
thing I have seen. All they have not is the horns.
They eat like cattle, and sleep like cattle, and they
have not care nothings about your house if it is clean
or not. They spittin everywhere on the floor
everywhere. An American man, he take off the stove-
cover and spit in, or he go outside. But not so the
French. Look, too, the way they eat. At the family
48 New England and its Neighbors
table, which is what I call to make high tone of it
same like hotel dot where is set the boss and the
teamsters who mos ly not from Canada, and they
eat jus* one-quarter what do the others. They have
the same kind, but they take not so much. How
much bread you think I makes every day, hey ? It is
so much as fifty loaves !
" All the time these French, they feelin good. The
least little thing they will laugh, and so hearty ! it
seem to them so awful funny. They are jus like
colored people, I make it so easy to please as a
child. But they do not play much only checkers
sometimes, and one more game, which you lean over
mit your face in your hat and put your hand flat out
behind you. The others they all stand round, and
some one he slaps your hand, and you jump quick mit
your eyes out of your hat, and try if you can see who
it was. If you say right, dot one takes your place.
They play dot game much and for long time and
laugh and think it more funny as anything in the
world. Other camps they play card; but Mr. Fre-
neau do not allow card for because they gamble their
money and perhaps they fight. Last year some they
play in the blacksmith shop of our camp, and the boss
he found about it and turn them off.
" On Sundays we do not our breakfast eat until
eight, and the men that day lie much in their bunks,
and some read papers. But the half, they can-
A SCALER
When the White Mountains are White 49
not read at all, they are so ignorant; and so one
man he may read aloud to a good many. They mend
their clothings on Sunday, and perhaps they wash clean
their underwears and hang them to dry, and they, might
whittle out some axe-helve. It is now coming spring,
and we begin have warm Sundays, and the men they go
out and run to chase themselves and crow like a rooster
and blat like a sheep and all sort of noise, and see
which the strongest man at rolling logs.
" You might thinks we be lonesome here, but we
have to keep too busy for dot. I have intend, though,
not to come into the woods again another time. It
is too much cold. This kitchen, it is like one ice
house. There are cracks so many the heat all go out.
We had one night thirty-four below zero, and my
bread it all froze and had to be thaw before I could
get a knife into it. Dot most scare me. We tries to
be neat, and we wants to mop the floor often, but when
it cold the water freeze right on the boards. Oh, you
can t think there is no fun sometimes.
" The taters what we use now have got freeze, too,
and most all the days until this week the windows are
frost all over so thick we cannot look out, and I have
to fight and fight to get the wood dot we burn. I
want not to meddle mit anythings not my business,
but how we can cook if we have not the wood ? It
is the dry wood only we use from trees dot are dead
and stand up and you be surprise the wood in them
$o New England and its Neighbors
so dry as one bone. If they fall they get full of wet in
no times. It kind of small work chop wood for stoves,
and the men not like to spend the time to bother. I
wish not to fight, but it is hard not to do dot mit some
beoples. You have keep shut your eyes if you don t
want to have troubles mit them. That wood makes me
much worry and extra works."
The cook while he talked did not pause in his labor
save now and then to cast his eyes toward me at the
more important points and make sure that I under
stood. But now he stopped both his remarks and his
work to peer out a pane of glass in the low back door.
" Did you never see this bird ? " he asked at length.
I went to the window, and there was a woodpecker
digging away at a haunch of beef that lay over a barrel
outside. Later I inquired of one of the sealers about
the wild creatures of the winter woods, and he mentioned
seeing bluejays, chickadees, and flocks of snow-buntings*
Red squirrels were plentiful around the camp and made
away with a good deal of corn from the storehouse.
Often he came across fox and rabbit tracks on the
snow, and some of the men had seen a deer.
Nearly all the time I was in the logging camp it
snowed, though never with much vigor, and there
were spells when the storm would cease and the
clouds lift, disclosing the mountains rising in serene
majesty all around. I could as easily have believed
their ghostly heights were dreams as realities, so un-
When the White Mountains are White 51
expectedly did they loom forth from the void, and so
strangely transformed and unsubstantial did they appear
with the snow delicately frosting their tree-clad slopes to
the remotest peak. But these wider outlooks were as
fleeting as they were enchanting, and soon the veil of
falling flakes would droop over the crystal summits, and
the world would quickly dwindle to a little patch of
snowbound forest close about. This latter view was
the most characteristic one as far as my experience is
concerned, and it is this vision which remains with me
most vividly a fragmentary vignette of the great white
woods, pure and unsullied beyond expression.
A Logging-camp Dwelling
Ill
A RUIN BESIDE LAKE CHAMPLAIN
w
"HAT river is
that?" asked the
man occupying
the seat in front of me as our
train began to skirt the shores
of a body of water about sev
enty-five miles north of Al
bany.
He put the question to
the conductor who responded,
" That s Lake Champlain."
" You don t say so ! Why,
I could throw across it ! I
had no idea it was so narrow,"
and the man seemed disap
pointed as well as surprised.
He would have found a
good deal of difficulty in
throwing across, yet the lake really is extremely attenu
ated at the south end, and slenderness is a characteristic
52
Considering his Neighbor s
Fields
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 53
even to its outlet. On a clear day, especially, the
opposite shore is so distinct and apparently near that
it requires an effort to remember you are looking on a
lake and not the broad channel of a stream. When
the distance is veiled in summer haze or with falling
rain this effect is less marked, the other shore seems
farther removed, and the charm of the lake is greatly
enhanced.
The aspect of the surrounding country is gentle and
pastoral. There are occasional wooded ridges, and
there are mountains, blue and dreamy along the hori
zon, that are as calmly beautiful as the " Delectable
Mountains" of John Bunyan s " Pilgrim s Progress";
but the landscape immediately adjoining the lake is
nearly always one of fertile and well-cultivated farm
fields. Villages and towns are frequent, most of them
wholly rural, with white houses among elm, maple, and
apple trees, and a church spire or two rising above the
foliage.
The region is not an industrial centre. It is off the
main thoroughfares of trade, and, so far as I could judge,
even the little manufacturing it had was on the wane.
For instance, at Crown Point were iron-works run
until recently ; but now the furnaces are cold, and the
smoke no longer drifts from the tall chimneys, and the
huddled, brown-painted homes of the operatives in
regular streets with their distressing alikeness and bar
renness of surroundings are all vacant.
54 New England and its Neighbors
" It ain t easy to make small plants pay nowadays,"
explained a native, " and this one busted up and went
to pieces last year."
But if things looked rather dismal around the Crown
Point iron-works by the lakeside, the town up the hill
seemed to be unaffected by the disaster a simple,
In Crown Point Village
pleasant country place, the abode of farmers and a few
shopkeepers. It had a delightfully sleepy, easy-going
air as I saw it one spring day. A man on his way to the
fields was driving two horses attached to a plough through
the street, a carriage was hitched in front of a store
while the owner was inside doing some trading, and
on the door-sill of another store sat two men visiting.
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 55
I rambled on past the common with its flagstaff and its
soldiers monument of the usual type a column bear
ing the names of several of the most important battles
of the Rebellion with a standing soldier on top, and
I kept on until I left the central village. The houses
became scattering, and there were rough hollows given
up to pasturage, and, athwart the west, were forest-clad
mountains. That it was spring with summer coming
was very apparent from the work going forward about
the homes woodpiles being wheeled in from the
yards to the sheds, the scratching together and setting
on fire heaps of brush and rubbish, and the sowing and
planting in the gardens. When a garden was near the
road it always attracted the interest of passers, and if a
man going along on foot found his neighbor at work
with his hoe in the garden plot, he was apt to lean over
the fence and get and give some agricultural advice,
and at the same time swap the latest items of local
news.
On my way back to the town I encountered a small
boy, slopping about the borders of a marshy roadside
pool, looking for frogs. He had captured two of the
creatures and was carrying them in one hand by
the hind legs. The boy was perfectly oblivious of
the fact that the frogs had feeling. Their distress was
naught to him. He had no purpose in catching them
beyond idle curiosity the gratification of some sav
age aboriginal instinct. When I produced a penny.
56 New England and its Neighbors
he willingly set the frogs free and started off in a bee-
line for the nearest candy store.
A man not far away, repairing a zigzag rail fence,
had paused in the process of driving in a stake to
watch the frog transaction. He was a stubby, elderly
man, with a brush of gray whiskers under his chin.
" There s plenty of them creeturs this year," he
said, as the boy disappeared ; " I got a pond near my
house and the frogs holler so nights in that air pond,
I can t hardly sleep. Last Sunday, I believe it was, I
got up out o bed about leven o clock and went down
and flung some stones at em. They stopped then,
but they was all goin it bad as ever by the time I got
back to the house."
" How many cows do you keep in this pasture of
yours ? " I inquired, changing the subject.
" Thirteen."
" Isn t that an unlucky number ? "
"Maybe tis, but I know I get more from those
thirteen than some of my neighbors do from twice as
many. I was born and raised on the other side of the
lake. They know how to farm over there, and they re
bringin no end o produce acrost every year that we
had ought to raise ourselves. You see this ere lot
up the hill here next to my pastur . It belongs to
the man that lives in that green and yellow house just
beyond the church, and there ain t no better land in
the state of New York, but he gets mighty slim crops
MENDING THE PASTURE FENCE
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 57
off n it. I d like to see a Vermont man farm that lot
awhile. If you ain t never been around in the coun
try over the lake you d better pay it a visit ; and there s
old Fort Frederick, too, over there at ChimJey Point,
you d like to see."
But instead of visiting Vermont and Chimney Point
I went southward to Ticonderoga. I made a blunder
ing journey; for I learned, after going sadly astray, that
if one would leave the train at the station nearest the
ancient fortress, he must alight neither at Ticonderoga
nor at Fort Ticonderoga, but at a place called Addison
Junction. This last is not a town. It is not even a
village. The habitations consist of a farm-house or two
and several rusty little dwellings in which live workers
on the railroad.
I arrived in the late afternoon, and my first care was
to find a place to stay over night. Close by the
tracks, next the station, was a small house marked
" Restaurant." The station-master assured me I would
have no difficulty in getting lodging there, though the
prospect of doing so seemed to me rather dismal, but
he proved to be right. The restaurant part consisted
of a single small room with a counter across the rear.
A short glass case on the counter contained a display of
cigars, and the wall behind was built up with shelves
scantily set with bottles and a few boxes of plug tobacco.
The house was kept by North of England people. They
had come over twenty years before, but they still re-
j 8 New England and its Neighbors
tained their peculiar home accent, said " Ay " instead
of " Yes," and constantly addressed me as " Sir" ; while
the hired girl, after the English fashion, called the land
lady " the Missus." The latter was setting the supper
table when I came in, and soon informed me the meal
was ready.
After I had eaten, as it was too late to hunt up the
old fortress, I loitered down to a ferry not far from my
stopping-place. The ferryman was doing some tinker
ing on shore, and the boat was fastened for the night.
It was a flat-bottomed scow, that would carry comfort
ably about three teams. The power used was steam,
but many Champlain ferry-boats employ sails instead,
thus obliging whoever runs one of the craft to coax
it along with oars, or by poling, when the wind is
light.
All through the winter the lake is frozen over, and
the ice makes an excellent bridge. " You can drive
anywhere on it," said the ferryman, " but mostly they
only go from shore to shore, unless they fix up a track
for a hoss race."
" Are there ever any accidents ? " I inquired.
cc Well, yes, folks are apt to get careless, and they
keep goin* after the ice begins to rot in the spring. The
last man that broke through here was a Dutchman by the
name of Schwillbug or something of that sort. He was
a pedler and he had a fine hoss, and a cart that was
all painted up slick as you please. Over on the other
A LAKE CHAMPLAIN FERRY
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 59
side there seems to be a little current at the end of the
ferry wharf, and we mostly don t go off the ice right
on to the wharf but take a turn out around it. We
told the Dutchman how this was, but he knew better
and said there was no danger whatever. So he drove
straight for the wharf and in he went. He got
out himself, but he lost his cart and he lost his
hoss."
The sun had set while I lingered at the ferry. Now
in the deepening dusk I walked far up over a western
hill, at first through the woods and then between
pastures and occasional cultivated fields. I went on
till from the brow of a hill I overlooked a low valley,
a-twinkle with the cheerful lights of a town. A whip-
poorwill was calling from a woodland hollow, and
numerous blundering beetles were rising from the grass
and buzzing amid the new leafage of the trees.
Here and there were houses on the upland, and as
I went back I noted them more particularly. They
were little, clapboarded, unpainted cabins that bore a
close resemblance to the negro hut of the South. Some
of them were scarcely large enough to contain one
decent-sized room, but I suppose they usually had at
least a kitchen, a bedroom and, overhead, a low cham
ber. Most of the dwellings had an accompaniment
of sheds and a small barn, and the premises were strewn
with litter and unsheltered tools and vehicles. Under
the eaves of each house was a water-barrel and, close
60 New England and its Neighbors
bv, a nondescript and meagre pile of wood still uncut.
Apparently the inmates never got a supply of stove
wood ready ahead, but daily used axe and saw when
necessity compelled. The hamlet was a characteristic
community of poor whites a gathering of the shiftless,
the unenergetic and unambitious, and to some extent
of the vicious. I inquired later about these people,
questioning if there was not a prospect of their better
ing themselves and whether their poverty was a
necessity.
" They live along from year to year just about the
same/ was the reply, " and I can t say as they improve
any. They could get ahead if they was a min to. But
what some folks don t spend on eatables they spend on
drinkables, and that s the whole secret of it."
At my lodging-place, when I returned, " Kit " the
hired girl was putting on her things preparatory to
going to a neighbor s to watch with a sick woman for
the night. "She s got the typhoid," Kit explained,
" and the Missus and me and quite a number of
women around here go in and help what we can.
Land s sake ! I do know what they d do if we
didn t, though they ve got the handiest little girl there
I ever see. She s only ten, poor little soul, but she s
a worker, and she can cook as well as a grown person.
Her father s a brakeman on the railroad, and he says
since his wife s been sick he s never come home but
that girl of hisn s had the victuals ready right on time.
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain
61
When she ain t nothing else to do she likes to sit and
rock and read; She s a regular old grandma that s
Rhubarb
what she is. There s six children and she s the oldest.
She takes good care of the little shavers, specially the
62 New England and its Neighbors
baby. Yesterday I gave her an apple and stead of
eating it herself she pared it and gave it to the baby.
He was sitting on the floor with it when I come away
and she said, * You bet he ll keep a-lappin that till
he s lapped it all down. Well, I must be goin or that
girl ll lock the door and go to bed."
The next morning was fair and warm. The
meadows were jubilant with bobolinks, and great num
bers of swallows that had homes in the lakeside banks
were darting hither and thither. I made an early start
and turned my footsteps toward the old fort. It was
barely a quarter of a mile from the station in a direct
line, but the route thither was by a devious farm road
through the fields. This road was little used and was
hardly more than a few wheel ruts cutting into the turf,
It went through several bar-ways and two or three
dooryards and ended at a pasture gate which was wired
so securely I was compelled to clamber over.
In the pasture a herd of ponies was feeding and they
came nibbling toward me to investigate. But when
they discovered that I was bound for the ancient forti
fications, they seemed to lose interest and left me to my
fate. On the highest slope of the pasture I had seen
from afar a group of ruins. The more prominent of
them were the gray, ragged stone walls of what had
been the officers barracks. These were hardly massive
or extensive enough to be exactly imposing, yet they
looked satisfactorily historic and they gained much
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 63
from their striking situation. The land falls away to
the north and west very gradually, but to the east and
south it drops in steep bluffs and green-turfed declivi
ties to the lake, and the height commands the water
way most thoroughly. The crowning ridge of the
pasture was upheaved in a chaos of stone walls, great
ditches, and grass-grown banks, and there were lesser
fortifications scattered over a considerable area neigh
boring. The walls of some of the old barracks were
yet fairly intact, and I could see what had been their
original height and where had been the windows and
the fireplaces ; but our climate is not kindly to ruins,
and the stones are constantly dropping and the walls
crumbling. It is a wild, neglected spot. The mullein
grows stoutly here and there, and I found the mounds
and ditches much overrun with clumps of thorn trees
and cedars and by a thicket of little poplars with their
leaves a-flutter in the breeze.
The sole garrison of the place seemed to be a wood-
chuck. He saw me coming while I was still at a con
siderable distance and hastened toward his hole in one
of the earthworks. But his curiosity was greater than
his discretion, and he would make a little run and then
pause to learn what were my intentions. When he
reached the mouth of his hole, he waited until I came
within two rods of him. Then he dove down out of
sight. I stood a few moments to see whether he had
gone for good, and shortly he poked his nose out
64 New England and its Neighbors
again, and I am not sure but that he had his eyes on
me all the time that I spent in the vicinity of his citadel.
Few places on our continent excel Ticonderoga in
historic attraction. Even the name is sonorous and
heroic, and its capture by Ethan Allen is one of the
best-remembered events of the Revolution. The
victory was a bloodless one, yet the story has many
picturesque accessories that stir patriotic enthusiasm.
Western Massachusetts and Vermont were at that time
sparsely settled, and the greater portion of them and of
northern New York was an undisturbed wilderness.
Roadways were few and it was customary for travellers
going north and south in this district to take advan
tage of the natural highway furnished by the Hudson,
Lakes George and Champlain, and the Richelieu River.
To secure this route to themselves the French had
long before pushed southward from Canada and built
frequent blockhouses and other defences; and in 1735
they erected Fort Carillon, or as it was afterward
known, Fort Ticonderoga, the strongest fortress on
American soil. So powerful was it that its existence
caused not a little anxiety in England. An attempt
was made by the English to capture it in 1758, but
after repeated assaults and great losses the attacking
force retreated utterly demoralized toward Albany.
The next year another large force advanced on Carillon
and the French blew up that and the rest of the forts
along the lake and fell back to Canada.
A Ruin beside Lake Chaniplain
TIconderoga Ruins
By the English the stronghold was rebuilt and its
name changed to Ticonderoga, the Indian name of a
neighboring waterfall. Because of the strength and
importance of Ticonderoga s location, the Colonies at
the beginning of the Revolution were naturally anxious
to possess it. The initiative toward accomplishing this
object was taken by several gentlemen in Connecticut,
who got together secretly at Hartford, in April, 1775,
and having found certain persons willing to engage in
the enterprise, furnished them with funds to buy sup
plies and defray the other expenses that might be
incurred. These persons set off immediately for
Bennington, Vermont, with the intention of getting
66 New England and its Neighbors
Colonel Ethan Allen to join in the undertaking and
help raise an adequate force for the capture of the fort.
On the way their numbers grew to about sixty, and
a hundred more men were soon added from the hills
of the New Hampshire Grants, as Vermont was then
called. A vote was then taken, to determine who
should be the leader, and the honor was awarded to
Colonel Allen.
Meanwhile, a committee in eastern Massachusetts,
unaware of the action of the Connecticut conclave,
appointed Benedict Arnold, who was then at Cam
bridge, " commander-in-chief " over a body of men not
exceeding four hundred which he was directed to enlist,
and with them to reduce the fort at Ticonderoga. To
carry this commission into effect Arnold promptly pro
ceeded to the western part of the state, where he learned,
much to his chagrin, that his plan had been forestalled.
He then hastened with a single attendant to join the
little band in Vermont, and on the 8th of May over
took the Green Mountain Boys just as they had com
pleted their preparations and were about to set forth.
But Arnold had no sooner arrived than he asserted the
right to take command of the entire expedition, alleging
that this was his due by virtue of his commission from
the Massachusetts committee. To this high-handed
claim the rank and file of the troop strenuously ob
jected. They chose to go under their own officers or
not at all, and were for " clubbing their muskets and
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 67
marching home." Indeed, such a mutiny arose that
the whole design was almost frustrated. But the matter
was finally settled, and Arnold was to some extent pla
cated by being assigned an honorary place and allowed
to move at the head of the column on Colonel Allen s
left.
The Americans by the night of the 9th had con
trived to cross the lake, and lay near the fort waiting
for daybreak. With the first hint of morning light
Allen led his followers to the entrance of the fort.
The gate was shut, but the wicket was open, and
though the sentry snapped his fusee, before the alarm
he gave could summon his comrades, the Americans
had dashed into the fort and raised the Indian war-
whoop. Little resistance was offered. The few
soldiers on guard, after a shot or two, threw down
their arms, and Allen strode to the quarters of Dela-
place, the commandant. As he reached the door
Delaplace appeared in his night garments and listened
in amazement to the demand for the surrender of the
fort.
" By what authority ? " asked the startled Briton.
" In the name of the great Jehovah and the Conti
nental Congress," was Allen s reply.
The assault was entirely unexpected, the surprise
was complete, and the valuable fortress, with its large
equipment of cannon and ammunition, fell into the
hands of the Americans at a very opportune time.
68 New England and its Neighbors
Within the next two years they made Ticonderoga a
stronghold that they thought well-nigh impregnable.
They threw up numerous outlying defences, erected
Fort Independence on the bluffs across the lake and
connected the two forts with a sunken bridge. One
of the great logs of this bridge was not long ago
detached and brought to the shore, and an old farmer
with whom I talked told me he had a portion of it at
his house.
cc Some say wood in the water ll rot," said he, " but
it won t. You keep wood in the water all the time, or
you keep it perfectly dry all the time, and it ll last for
ever. It s wet and dry raises the mischief. This log
that they pulled up had lain there and never seen the
air in more than a hundred years, and it was as sound
as a Spanish milled dollar."
In spite of all the Americans did in strengthening
Ticonderoga, it failed them at a most critical time ; for
when Burgoyne reached it on his famous invasion, they
were obliged to ingloriously abandon their elaborately
prepared defences without a shot. To the southwest,
on the other side of Ticonderoga Creek, or "Ti Crick,"
as it is called locally, rise the steep wooded sides of
Mt. Defiance. The Americans had fancied the
height was one which could not be scaled with cannon,
and when the British accomplished this, Ticonderoga
was at their mercy, and the Americans could do nothing
but get out.
A Ruin beside Lake Champlain 69
However, the earlier investment of the place by
Ethan Allen is the better recalled. It was far more
dramatic "And yet," commented the old farmer
whom I have previously quoted, " nothing was ever
more foolhardy. Allen was completely in the power
of the British. He played J em a trick and the trick
worked. It was just luck. If he hadn t succeeded,
we d all say what a crazy notion it was. Same way
with Funston capturing Aguinaldo out in the Philip
pines. He come out all right, but it was chance just
the same, and it d been a foolish business if he d
failed."
The Pasture in which stand the Old Fortifications
IV
IN THE ADIRONDACKS
I
LJL be ready in
a minute/ said
the stage - coach
driver, and then he
spent half an hour
stowing away a vast
cargo of boxes, bar
rels, and other mis
cellany in his rusty,
canopy - topped vehi
cle. So little spare
space was left I was
thankful that I was the
only passenger. I had
just alighted from a
train at a little station
among the outlying
foot-hills of the mountains, and my destination was an
inland valley. When the driver climbed in and took
up his reins to start, I called his attention to several
70
A Fisherman
In the Adirondacks 71
great piles of hemlock bark near by awaiting transfer
to some tannery.
" Those piles ain t nothin to what we used to see,"
was my companion s comment. " Our timber lands
are growin poorer all the time, and hemlock bark s
gittin more skurce every year. We re cuttin off
everythin we c n git a cent for that s the trouble."
From what the driver said and all I had heard of
lumbering in the Adirondacks I expected to find the
mountains much denuded, but to my eyes they seemed
still heavily timbered. Yet most of the finest trees
have undoubtedly been felled, and the ancient primeval
majesty of the forest is departed forever.
We had not gone far on our road when the driver
pointed with his whip toward a high* mountain slope
across which there was a drift of yellow smoke. c< By
gol, look a that ! " he exclaimed. " Thar s a fire up in
thar, and it s started since I went down an hour ago.
But it s too early in the season for it to burn good.
The woods ain t dry yit. Last summer we fit fires
stiddy for a month, and the fire wardens got out every
one they could git. Sometimes thar d be a hundred
men workin on the same mountain. We carried
shovels and dug trenches. You see the top o the
ground was dry several inches deep, and would burn
off. We d dig down to whar it was damp, and when
the fire got to the ditch we d made it would usually
stop ; but if thar was a stick lay across, or a dead tree
72 New England and its Neighbors
got to burnin and fell over the line, the fire would start
again and we d have to trench around it once more. It
ain t a job I like fightin fire with all the smoke
and climbin and the diggin . Sometimes I ve been
surrounded by the fire and had to break a way out
through the flames. You have to look out for that. 1
" How do the fires start ? " I asked.
" We don t often find out for certain, but thar s a
lot o fire bugs in the mountains. They re sore over
the game laws, or they start a fire so s to earn some
money puttin of it out. The pay s high enough to
make that quite an inducement. We git two dollars
a day. The state pays half and the town half; and
you never can tell when you git a lot of men out
whether they re Vorkin or not. Some of em just
lie around drunk. Last year s fire ran over those
ridges on ahead thar. You c n see whar it s burnt,
can t you ? "
Yes, I could see long stretches of the upper moun
tains that seemed to be a charred desolation of black
earth and gaunt, dead trees. It looked as if the green
would never return.
" Off on those higher mountains are white patches
that appear to be snow," I remarked presently.
" I do know but they are. More likely, though,
they re bare rocks and the sun glistenin on water
that s runnin down over em. Still, thar s snow in
some of the high hollows most all summer. We ve
In the Adirondacks 73
got what they call an ice cave in the town whar I live,
and every Fourth of July regular the young folks go
up to it and have some fun snowballing. Thar ll be
plenty of snow thar next Fourth if we c n judge any
thing by the winter we ve had. Worst winter for
snow t I c n remember. It begun in November with
a three-foot storm that caught us all unexpected. I d
been ploughing the day before, and it buried my plough
out of sight. I had to go and dig the plough out of a
drift that was higher n my head. For five days we was
cut off from the mail and everything else. Dozens of
weak roofs was broken in mostly of sheds, piazzas,
and barns, but sometimes of houses. After that storm
we never had any let-up. The snow kept comin and
gittin deeper all winter. Thar was too much for good
sleighin and too much for loggin in the woods ; but
it went fast as soon as the sun begun to warm up about
the first of April."
We were now going through a narrow pass between
two mountains, and I mentioned the wildness of the
spot to the driver. " Yes, it is kind o wild," said he,
" that s a fact. This is a great runway for bears across
here. They ve got a den back on one o the ridges
not fur away. You find their tracks in the road
often, and about a year ago this time as I was walfcin
my horses up the hill we re comin 1 to I see a bear
an old big fellow large as a cow diggin out mice
at the foot of a rotten stump. But they keep out o*
74 New England and its Neighbors
the way and don t often show themselves. Lot s o
people that have lived in the Adirondacks all their
days have never laid eyes on a live wild bear. Do
you know Len Hoskins ? He s a hunter and guide,
and he s got a little place off in the woods where he
stays a good share o the time. He sees bears every
year. He routed out one bear right in the middle of
winter. Twa n t nothin strange. The bears don t
hide away in the rocks as you might think. Rocks are
too cold. They like to crawl into some hollow, or a
narrow place between two fallen trees and let the snow
drift over em. This bear of Len s had put up not so
very far from a wood road, and Len was goin along
and his dog was with him, and the dog run off among
the trees and begun to bark and paw the snow. Len
saw t he d struck some game, and he sicked the dog on,
and first thing he knew a bear rose up out of the snow.
The bear got the dog, but Len, he had his gun, and he
got the bear.
" I had a little adventure myself one time when I
was spending a few days with Len. He had some
bear traps out and one o the animiles got caught. It
was a little year-old cub, and I expect it had been in
the trap for at least two days when we found it. The
trap had broke the bear s leg, and it had got out and
left its leg behind, but it couldn t go far. We d been
out pickin berries and hadn t nothing except our jack-
knives and a couple of long sticks we d cut for canes,
In the Adirondacks 75
and we d V let the bear alone if we d thought we was
goin to have any trouble. That little beast was ter
rible spunky, if it didn t have but three legs, and soon
as it see twa n t no use tryin to git away it showed
fight. First it would go for Len and I d whack it
with my stick, and then it would turn on me and Len
would git in a whack. We had a fifteen minutes tussle,
and I worked harder and sweat more than I ever have
in that length of time before or since. But at last we
killed the critter and slung him on a pole and carried
him to camp. We had bear steak for a while then,
and I called it better* n venison."
" Do the bears ever trouble the farmers any ? " I
inquired.
"No, they don t do much damage. I did some
think they got six sheep o mine a few years ago, but
I guess those bears didn t have more n two legs. Thar
wa n t the least sign o the sheep to be found nowhar,
and a bear always leaves the hide, if nothin more. It s
torn some, but it s cleaned out a good sight cleaner
than you could git it with a knife. The deer do the
most harm. They ll git over the best fence we got,
and the back lots next to the woods ain t never safe
from *em. They spoil more n a little grain for us, and
they re gittin worse, too. The law don t allow hunt
ing of em with hounds now, and they ain t so timid as
they was, and they re increasin . But thar s too many
hunters for em ever to git very numerous."
j6 New England and its Neighbors
About the middle of the afternoon, the stage reached
the end of its route, and I continued farther into the
mountains on foot. Most of the way the road led
through the woodland up a valley, and had close
beside it a swift, noisy stream. The forest was charm
ing with the emerald and tawny tints of spring, and was
musical with bird songs. As for the walking, it might
have been better. Sturdy rocks humped up out of the
earth at intervals in the very centre of the highway,
there were often muddy shallows in the low spots fed
by little rivulets that trickled down the wheel tracks,
and not infrequently I encountered boggy places
which had been filled in with brush and corduroy.
The corduroy was not, however, of a very strenuous
type not much more than saplings. You would
have to search far now to find the genuine article, but
it used to be common in the Adirondacks, wherever
the road inclined to be soft. Ordinarily it consisted
of substantial sticks about six inches in diameter, but
which might be as much as ten. In any case they
would fairly make one s teeth rattle to drive over
them.
Along the road I was travelling were occasional
meadow openings occupied by a house or two, or per
haps several of them ; and in the fields near these
houses I was pretty apt to see men and boys busy
ploughing and planting. The land in the clearings
was for the most part steep and broken, and the
* !> " <,
AN ADIRONDACK FARMER
In the Adirondacks 77
soil so stony that the progress of a man ploughing
was very jerky and uncertain. He was constantly
striking, not only loose stones of all sizes, but heavy
boulders that brought him to frequent sudden stops.
Then he had to pull and haul to get ready for a fresh
start.
Wherever I went during my Adirondack stay the
houses were small and usually unpainted. The
barns were likewise meagre and rusty, and though
the storage room they afforded was likely to be eked
out by a number of sheds and lean-tos, it never seemed
to be equal to demands. A very common arrange
ment of the house buildings was to have the barns
just across the road from the house. If such were the
case, the manure heaps were very likely thrown out of
the stable windows on the houseward side in conspic
uous view. This was simply a matter of barbaric
convenience, and was formerly customary in all our
older farming regions.
The Adirondack sheds and barns were often of logs ;
but the era of log construction is past, and buildings of
this kind are becoming rarer every year. The majority
of the log dwellings that still remain have been added
to and improved past recognition, and the rudeness of
those that continue as originally built is a constant
distress if their caretakers have any pride. The logs
used are hewed off a little on each face, so that they
are halfway between round and square, and the chinks
7 8 New England and its Neighbors
are stopped with plaster. Such houses are considered
warmer in winter than frame buildings ; but the floors
are uneven, the log sills of the second story are exposed,
and the walls inside and out are alternating ridges and
hollows. If the rooms are papered, the roughness of
the walls is still apparent, and the paper is sure to crack
badly and peel off in spite of all that can be done.
One of the Adirondack days I remember with
especial pleasure was a certain lowery Friday. In the
afternoon I was caught by a shower that came charg
ing with its mists down a mountain glen. I hastened
along the forest road while the drops played a tattoo
on the leaves overhead, until I reached a roadside
house where I sought shelter in a woodshed with an
open front. This shed was in the ell of a house
adjoining the kitchen, and was used in part as a back
room. The far side was stowed full of neatly piled
split wood, but in the other half were pots and kettles
and pails, a swill barrel, and a rusty stove. I asked a
woman at work in the kitchen for a drink of water;
and she brought out a chair for me, and stepped across
the yard and filled a dipper at a tub set in the ground.
This tub was connected with a spring up the hill, the
woman said ; but, though springs were abundant, very
few of the neighbors had running water. They were
deterred by the expense of buying pipe, and got along
with wells. From these they as a rule drew the water
by means of some old-fashioned windlass contrivance,
In the Adirondacks 79
or a pole with a hook on the end, or an antiquated
well-sweep.
I had not been long in the shed where I had taken
refuge when a small boy in a big straw hat came
around the corner of the house. He carried a fish-
pole and a tin box. He had been fishing for trout, he
said, but had caught chubs.
" Do you always fish for trout ? " I questioned.
Yes."
" And do you ever catch any ? "
" No," he acknowledged despondently, "just
chubs. I put em in this box. It s full of water."
He took off the cover and showed me several tiny
fish swimming about within.
" Are they good to eat ? " I inquired.
" No, they re only good to kill," he responded with
frank innocence of his savagery.
Now his mother called to him. <c Willie," she said,
" I wish you would bring in some wood before it rains
any harder that wood outdoors, you know, that we
didn t have room for in the shed."
The boy went lingeringly toward the remnants of a
pile in the yard. "It s thunderin , mamma," said he.
" You d better hurry, then."
" Sounds like tumblin down stones."
" Hurry up ! "
" Mamma, there s a hawk ! "
"Well, I don t care!"
8o
New England and its Neighbors
" It s a. chicken-
hawk, I guess !
Come aout and see
it. It ll get those
little chickens of
ourn."
" Don t stan out
there hollerin any
longer bring in
the wood."
But the boy had
slipped away be
hind the house, and
a few moments
later he reappeared
with his father,
whom he had sum
moned from the
cornfield.
" Let me have
Shelling Seed Corn my gun ! " the man
called to his wife, with his eyes turned skyward toward
the hawk, and the woman handed it out to him. He
clicked a cartridge into the muzzle and aimed at the
soaring bird. But he did not fire. " Too high up,"
said he, lowering the gun and passing it back to his wife.
" Well," he went on, " I guess I ll shell some seed
corn, and then if it keeps on rainin I ll go fishinV
In the Adirondack^ 81
" Do you go fishing every time it rains ? " I
queried.
" No, but I m pretty apt to. The fish bite better
in drizzlin weather."
He did not go this time, for he had hardly got his
corn and sat down in the shed to shell it, using his
hands and a cob, when the sun began to glint through
the flying drops and to brighten the green, watery land
scape. " Hello ! " said the man, " c Rain and shine
to-day, rain to-morrer. That s the old saying, but
I d like to have it pleasant for about a week so I could
finish up planting."
As soon as the shower was over I resumed my
rambling, and the tumbled ridges of the Adirondacks
never loomed finer than they did then, veiled in the
moist haze that succeeded the rain, with here and
there a filmy cloud floating across the loftier heights.
Wherever I obtained an extended view, the mountains
looked mighty and magnificent enough to satisfy their
most ardent admirers. I plodded along the muddy
roadway, sometimes in the dripping woods, sometimes
amid little house clearings. Toward evening I met a
small drove of cows coming home from pasture in
charge of a woman, the whole making a delightfully
idyllic bit of life there on the quiet of the secluded
forest way, with a murmuring stream close at hand and
the tink, tink of the bell on the leading cow s neck
adding its musical, rustic accompaniment. A little
82
New England and its Neighbors
later I came to a house with a pasture just across the
road, and in the pasture a lad milking. The boy said
most people drove their cows into the barnyard to
Bringing In the Cows after their Day s Grazing
milk them, but his folks always milked them there at
the pasture bars in summer. I had stopped to ask if
I could get kept over night at some place near, and he
sent me to the next house up the hill Mr. Macey s.
In the Adirondacks 83
One never has much trouble in getting lodged in
the Adirondacks. The wayfarer can find accommoda
tion at almost any home where he chooses to stop, and
the standard price is fifty cents for a room with supper
and breakfast. The house 1 sought was a little brown
dwelling on a slope overlooking a vast sweep of valley
and dim mountains. Mr. Macey was standing in the
yard smoking his pipe when I approached a thin,
gray man of rather more than threescore years. In
response to my question as to whether I could stay for
the night he leisurely removed his pipe and said:
" You ll find my wife and daughter in the house thar.
It s the women folks that do the work. All I do is
the eatin . You c n talk with them."
A stout, elderly woman appeared at the kitchen
door just then, set two pails of milk out on the piazza,
and asked rather sharply, "Why don t you feed this to
the calves as you was goin to an hour ago ? "
The old man stepped over to the piazza and took
the pails with an alacrity that betokened a smitten con
science. At the same time I went to the door and
proffered my request for lodging.
" It wouldn t be convenient to-night/ 1 replied Mrs.
Macey. "We re goin to keep a spectacle pedler
that came along before supper, and it wouldn t be
convenient to take any one else."
I was turning away when I was met by one of the
sons of the family coming across the yard from the
84 New England and its Neighbors
barn with the pedler of spectacles. "What s the
matter ? " he asked. " Where you goin ? Can t get
kept ? Well, I d like to know why ! See here ! " he
continued, turning to his companion, " you re used to
sleepin three in a bed, ain t you ? "
" Yes, sure, six ! "
" Do you kick ? "
" No, but I give you fair warnin I m a snorer."
"That s all right. You just as soon bunk in with
this man, hadn t you ? "
" Why, yes ! If he s satisfied, I am."
So it was settled and I stayed. The house proved
to be of logs, but these had been clapboarded over, and
the real construction was not revealed until I went
inside. There I found the logs very apparent, though
partially hidden by a covering of wall-paper. Over
head was the flooring of the rooms upstairs, with the
long sagging logs that served for joists incrusted with
many coatings of whitewash.
While I sat at supper eating alone, for I was late
and the others had finished, Mr. Macey came into the
back room. " I been talkin with that spectacle man,"
he remarked to his wife, " and he s a plaguey nice fel
ler, I ll bet ye."
" Well, you be careful then he don t sell you nothin
you don t want," was Mrs. Macey s comment, as she
came in to the supper table with a plate of cake. The
dog followed her. " Here, get out of here," she com-
In the Adirondacks 85
manded, taking up a piece of bread and throwing it out
into the back room.
Mr. Macey had entered the dining room and was
standing by the stove opening his jack-knife. " That s
a good dog," he said to me, " if he does get in the
"f * :
^* -5gr* ~ -&? *k* -^--rr^-j^?^^
Picking up Chips
way once in a while. He ain t never barking and
snapping at people. I d as lieve a man s children
would come out and throw stones at me as to have his
dog run out and bark at me every time I go past."
Mr. Macey now took up a stick and began to whittle
shavings. He did not sever them from the stick, but
86 New England and its Neighbors
left them fast at one end. When he had bristled up
the stick to his satisfaction, he laid it down, and took
up another which he treated in like manner.
"What are you making? " I inquired.
cc Kindlings. You see you touch a match to the
ends o them shavings and it ll start up a good blaze
right off. Whittling kindlings is a job I do every
night. I have to have two or three sticks fixed for
this stove, and two or three for the back-room stove.
I m usin cedar wood from some old fence posts at
present, but I like pine better when we can git it."
After I finished eating I visited the barn, where I
found Mr. Macey s two sons, Geoffry and "Ted,"
milking. They were lively, capable fellows about
eighteen or twenty years of age. I was just in time to
see Ted get into trouble with his cow. The creature
put her foot in his pail, and he jumped up, fierce with
wrath, and banged her with his stool, and called her
slab-sided, and went on to blast her with as wild and
sulphurous a string of invectives as I have ever heard.
But the milking was nearly done, and the boys soon
went to the house. The family presently got together
in the dining room, which also served as a sitting room
and to some extent as a kitchen, and the spectacles
pedler and I " made ourselves at home " with them.
" If I had such a cow as that red and yellow one I d
sell her," Ted remarked to his father with great disgust.
"What s the matter?"
In the Adirondacks 07
"She s got altogether too contrary a disposition.
You can t make her stand still."
"She ll stand still as a mouse when I milk her."
" These are the easiest galluses ever I wore/ inter
rupted Geoffry, giving a hitch to his suspenders ; " but
they feel darn funny when the buttons are off."
" They re made o leather, ain t they ? " asked the
spectacles pedler.
" Yes/ Geoffry replied, " I had em built special at
the harness-maker s. Come, Ted, sew on this button,
will you ? "
" I ll sew it on," said his mother.
" No you won t, ma. You ve done enough to-day.
I d sew it on myself if it wa n t around back of me."
Ted was willing enough and seated himself behind
his brother and got to work, at the same time men
tioning to his sister that he wished to goodness she d
make some pie-plant pie. " I was looking in the garden
this afternoon," he went on, "and the pie-plant s
gettin good and big."
"Oh, gee, Ted! why don t you say rhubarb?"
Molly commented. " If you was ever to take dinner
at a restaurant in the city, and ask for pie-plant pie,
they wouldn t know what you meant. They d think
you never had been out of the woods before."
" That wouldn t be anything much," declared Mr.
Macey. " There s people here in this town that nev
er ve been outside the county men older n I am."
88 New England and its Neighbors
" There s some people in this town too smart for
the clothes they wear, I know that ! " affirmed Geoffry,
severely.
cc I ll warrant you there are ! " exclaimed the pedler
of spectacles. " Some in my town too."
" I know a girl/ said the daughter of the house,
" who s never seen a train of cars in her life, and she s
twenty-two years old."
" I jolly ! " said the spectacles man, " if I was one o
you boys, I d hitch up and take that girl down to see
the cars right off."
" Oh, thunder ! you don t know the girl," snorted
Geoffry, " or you wouldn t be so sure. She d talk you
to death. It s nineteen miles to the railroad and nine
teen back."
" It s more than that, my kind little friend," said
Ted, and then the two brothers entered into a dispute
to settle the exact distance.
Meanwhile, Mr. Macey had got out his pipe and
was filling it. " I hain t been everywhere," he re
marked, " but I d be ashamed o myself if I hadn t
never seen a train o cars."
"Say, mister, you would, wouldn t you?" was the
pedler s comment.
" Well, a man that s more curious to me than any
one else around here," began Geoffry, " is a fellow I
know of who gets his living by sitting in his chair and
making ashes, and he s got a large family to support.
THE KITCHEN DOOR OF A LOG HOUSE
In the Adirondacks 89
Making ashes is about all I ve ever seen him do
just smoking, you know. I ve offered to give him a
cow for the receipt of how to live without doing noth
ing. He ain t got no cow, and he needs one bad, but
he won t sell me the receipt."
" He s got a horse/ said Ted.
" Yes, but what s that horse o his n good for ? "
queried Mr. Macey. " He keeps it just for swapping.
He d spend all his time swapping horses if he could
find any one to swap with, specially when he sees a
chance o gittin* something to boot. If he c n git
a dollar to boot, it don t matter what sort of a horse he
gits ; and there s times he ll only git a rooster or a
dozen eggs. Then, again, he maybe has to pay boot.
But I c n say one thing for him he d starve before
he d steal."
" Pete Foster s laid up yet with his sprained ankle, *
remarked Geoffry, changing the subject "He says
he wishes it had been a broken bone. Thinks if it
had been, he could a ordered a new one and got it here
by this time, and been out and around."
"What d he say about that two-shillin hen he
bought?" inquired Ted. "He s tellin* everybody
that now."
" Oh, he said he bought the hen, and the idea struck
him he d have it to eat,seein he was kind of an invalid
at present. So he got the hen ready for the kittle, and
his wife set up all night and boiled it. She didn t
90 New England and its Neighbors
seem to make much progress in cookin it tender, so
they boiled it all day, and twa n t done then, and Pete
he set up all that night to keep it boilin , and the next
morning, he tried it again, and it was -so tough he
couldn t stick a fork into the water it had been boilin 1
in."
" Pete s kep pretty straight sence he took the Kee-
ley cure, hain t he? " Mr. Macey interrogated.
"Yes; he won t even eat mince pie that s got cider
in it."
" Do many take the Keeley cure here ? " I inquired.
" Oh, land, yes, lots of em ; and some come back
and go right to drinkin again ; and then perhaps
they ll take the cure a second time and pay the hundred-
dollar fee twice over and still drink. But with a good
many it really makes a man of em. I ve known fel
lers cured that beforehand was that crazy for drink
they d swallow Jamaica ginger or peppermint essence,
if they couldn t get anything else."
" What did you mean awhile ago when you were
telling of a two-shilling hen ? " I asked Ted.
" I meant it cost two shillin s two York shillings
same as twenty-five cents. Folks speak of shillin s
a good deal round here, though there ain t no money
of that denomination, and never has been since I c n
remember. Mostly we reckon in shillin s when we
c n talk about a single shillin or two shillin s. Some
times you hear four shillin s instead of fifty cents, and
In the Adirondacks 91
ten shillin s instead of a dollar and a quarter, but for
the rest we say dollars and cents."
" At the house where I had dinner this noon/ said
I, "the man told me he went fishing the other day
and put six flies on his line, and he hooked three fish
at once. He got two of them, and the smaller one
weighed a pound and the other weighed two pounds,
and the one that broke away was big as both those he
caught put together."
" How d he know about the heft of the one that
broke away ? " queried Mr. Macey.
" He didn t explain that point," I replied, " He
said he caught the fish in the river down in the valley
below here, and they were trout from California that
had been put in the lake up above. They were so
gamey he couldn t pull them out, and he had to play
them and use a net."
" I ve heard about their putting in those trout there
from California or some other foreign country," said
Ted. " I hooked one myself down in the holler last
summer and it did act queer, but I finally treed it and
got it."
" What was the man s name where you stayed for
dinner ? " Mrs. Macey asked.
" Dickon."
"Dickon!" ejaculated Geoffry. "Well, I hope
the Lord you didn t believe all he told you ! "
" Did you have Dutch cheese there ? " inquired
92 New England and its Neighbors
Mr. Macey. " They re great hands for Dutch cheese
at Dickon s."
"They had it on the table/ I answered, "but it
isn t a thing I care for."
" Gosh, I do ! I wish I had a chunk of it in my
paw now. I d lay down my pipe and eat it. Where
was it Dickon said they d put in those trout ? "
" He said in the lake."
" What lake s that, I wonder."
" He meant the pond, father," Geoffry explained.
" The city people don t like ponds, and I don t believe
there s a pond left in the Adirondacks now. Dickon
drives for one of the sporting-houses in the summer,
and he s caught the city notion of giving what we ve
always known as a pond a more tony title."
" What do you mean by a sporting-house ? " I
asked.
"Oh, just a house where the city people stay a
summer hotel. There s one sporting-house in this
town that ll accommodate three hundred people. It s
only about two miles from here, but you have to climb
a deuce of a hill to get to it."
" We ve got a picture of it somewhere," said Mrs.
Macey. <c Won t you see if you can find it, Geoffry ?
and perhaps this gentleman would like to look at that
picture of our house we had taken last year."
Geoffry after a short absence brought forth the
latter from the next room, remarking : " I can t find
In the Adirondacks
93
the sporting-house, but here s this. It was made by
some men that came along in a photograph cart.
Sowing Oats
That s my mother and beloved sister sitting out in
front with the dog. There wa n t no one else at
94 New England and its Neighbors
home. You can see the shingles that we d patched
the roof with where it had been leaking and the whole
thing s very natural, I think/
" A while after the fellers had been along with their
cart/ said Mr. Macey, " they come again and brought
the picture all finished to sell, and they wanted two
dollars for it. That was too much. I d a paid a
dollar and been glad to ; but they began to throw off
when they see I wouldn t pay their price, and then I
didn t know what the thing was worth. They got
down to fifty cents finally, and I said I d give em
a quarter. They said the lowest they d take was half
a dollar. So after a while they started off, but they
hadn t got far when they stopped and hollered back
for me to get my quarter. It was a good bargain, I
guess."
"I don t think so," commented Molly. "What
do you want a picture of your own house for? If you
want to see your house, all you have to do is to go out
and look at it."
" I d like a picture of some of the houses the way
they was when I was a boy," said her father "log
houses with stone chimneys outside built against
the ends. In the kitchen you d find fireplaces big
enough to take in a backlog four feet long and two
feet through. I d like to see my daughter here try
to get a meal in one o those fireplaces. I know just
how my mother used to fry flapjacks she d stand
In the Adirondacks 95
there front o the fire with her long-handled frying-pan,
and when a cake was done on one side she d give a
shake to loosen it and then toss it up, and it would
come down on the other side. The floors were of
split logs hewed off flat. The kitchen d have one
or two bedrooms opening off of it, and up above
under the roof there d be a long, low chamber that
you went up to by a ladder.
" My wife, here, has a wool wheel yet, and spins
her own yarn and some to sell ; and a good many of
the older women in the Adirondacks does the same.
But the spinning they do is nothing to what their
mothers did. Besides wool, they used to spin flax,
and they had looms and wove their own cloth, and
they made all the clothes for the family. I c n
remember, too, how in the winter my grandmother
would put on a pair of men s boots, and wade through
the snow to the barn to milk. Some women still
know how to milk, but very few make a practice of
it. I tell you, them old-time women did a lot o work
that the women don t do these days.
"In my grandmother s family they ate off pewter
plates. They didn t have no crockery, and when
company came they d use the pewter just the same,
only they d give it a special shinin first
" My mother every fall d make up twenty-five or
thirty dozen of dipped candles, enough to last till
spring. Candles was all we had for lightin* the house,
96 New England and its Neighbors
and we had to use em, too, in our lanterns. Them
lanterns was tin, like a tall four-quart pot all pricked
Spinning Yarn for the Family Stockings
full of holes, and the holes only let out the light in
little slivers, so t if you wanted to see anything you
In the Adirondacks 97
had to open the lantern and give the candle a chance.
I recollect the time when we began to buy lamps for
whale oil, and, later, what they called fluid lamps
a spindlin kind of a glass lamp with two wicks and
little brass caps to go over the ends of the wicks for
extinguishers ; and then finally karosene come into
use.
"When I was a boy lots o people would go to
church in ox-teams, and sometimes a man would go
on horseback with his wife settin behind him. We
didn t dress up as much then for church as we do
now. I ve been to meetin barefoot, many a time."
My attention was presently attracted from Mr.
Macey s reminiscences by a game his sons had started.
They said they were playing " Bumblebee." Ted
had his fists together, thumbs up, with a light stick
poised on them. Geoffry was moving the forefinger
of his right hand around the end of the stick in an
erratic manner, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, and
dodging this way and that. At the same time he
made a variable buzzing sound with his mouth.
Suddenly he picked up the stick and gave his
brother s thumbs a smart rap. "There!** said he,
turning to the rest of us, "the bumblebee stung
him."
Ted had tried to part his fists and let the stick pass
harmlessly between them, but he had not been quick
enough. If he had succeeded he could have been the
98 New England and its Neighbors
bumblebee himself, and tried to sting Geoffry. The
game went on for some minutes, and then Ted turned
to me and asked if I had ever played " Chipmunk."
I had not, and the brothers proceeded to illustrate.
Ted got down on all fours, facing Geoffry, and the latter,
who remained seated, spread apart his legs and by put
ting his open hands just inside his knees made a kind
of human trap. Ted, squeaking and chattering in
imitation of a chipmunk, dodged his head this way and
that over the trap, and when he thought there was a
good opportunity bobbed it down between Geoffry s
legs, while Geoffry attempted to make a capture by
thumping his knees and hands together. But the chip
munk had escaped, and he set his trap again. Ted, this
time from below, went on chattering and making feints
to confuse Geoffry until he fancied he could safely jerk
his head back up ; and when Geoffry really did grip
Ted s head the two changed places. Long before they
had wearied of this sport, Mrs. Macey, who had retired,
called out from an adjoining room, " Boys, do stop that
noise and go to bed. I shan t get to sleep to-night if
you keep up that racket," and this brought the even
ing s sociability to a close.
In the morning the family were stirring about four
o clock, and by breakfast time, at half-past five, a good
start had been made on the day s work. Salt pork had
chief place in our morning bill of fare, but was supple
mented by boiled eggs and pancakes made from home-
In the Adirondacks
A Home in a Valley
grown buckwheat. As soon as we finished eating, the
boys turned the cows and sheep out to pasture, hitched
a pair of horses to a wagon and drove off to an out-
lying field they were planting to potatoes. The spec
tacles pedler lingered a short time in an attempt to
dispose of some of his wares and then resumed his
itinerant journeying. Mrs. Macey and Molly busied
themselves with the kitchen work, while Mr. Macey,
after doing a number of small jobs around the place, sat
down on the piazza to cut seed potatoes. The best of
the potatoes he sliced into a bushel basket, the small
ones he put in a pail to boil for the pigs, and the rot
ten ones he dropped into another pail to throw away.
ioo New England and its Neighbors
"When I was a youngster," said Mr. Macey, "we
used to begin saving the seed end of the potatoes that s
the end the eyes are on, you know in February
We d eat the other half."
" Yes," added Mrs. Macey, who had left her house
work to help with the potato-slicing, " and by plant
ing time we d have a great lot o those dried-up ends
ready. They didn t look as if they d grow, but they
would."
About eight o clock Ted came with the team to get
what potatoes were ready for the ground. "Why,
good Lord! father," he exclaimed as he alighted, "don t
cut any more. We shan t know what to do with
em."
But Mr. Macey was sure the supply was still insuffi
cient and kept on. Just then a tidily dressed little
girl passed along the road on her way to school.
"Good morning, Gusty," said the people on the
piazza.
The schoolhouse was not far distant a small, clap-
boarded wooden building with a board fence around
the yard. I had looked into it while on a walk that
morning, and I had on previous occasions visited several
others in the mountains. They were all much the
same very plain outside and in. A box stove was
always present with its long elbowing pipe, and they
were certain to be equipped with rude double desks
made by the local carpenters desks that were appar-
In the Adirondacks IOI
ently used as much by the pupils for whittling pur
poses as for study.
The school year in the mountain villages consists of
two terms of sixteen weeks each, so arranged as to have
the teachers free in summer to serve as waiters in the
sporting-houses. The usual pay received by a school
mistress is seven dollars a week. Out of this she has
to pay her board unless she resides in the district. If
she goes home Friday night to stay over Sunday, she
may get boarded for two dollars ; but if she stays the
full week, she has to pay from two and a half to three
dollars. " We used to pay women teachers a dollar a
week, and they boarded round," said Mr. Macey ; " but
of course we had to pay a man in winter considerable
more. I don t think the schools are as good now as
they were. They don t have as good discipline. *
"No," remarked Ted, "the teachers leave their
sled stake outdoors now. About all they do is to
give the scholars a tongue-banging."
" The boys used to be learnt to bow and the girls
to courtesy," Mr. Macey continued, " and when school
was dismissed they wa n t allowed to leave on the
jump. Now, when they have recess, you c n hear em
for miles the minute they re out. Another thing we
did a sight better n they do these days was spellin*.
We was always havin spellin matches in the school,
and our best spellers would go and spell against those
in other schools, and we d have great times/*
102 New England and Its Neighbors
" You d ought to seen the schoolhouse we had here
eight years ago," said Ted. " It was made of logs and
it had got so old it wa n t fit to keep calves in. The
sides were squshing out, and some of the sleepers that
held up the floor had rotted off one end and some the
other end. The stove had a rack around it on the
floor two or three inches high, that was filled in with
small stones and dirt, so the sparks and coals falling
out from the stove wouldn t set the building on fire.
The last teacher I had was Jane Traver. Her great
punishment was to have every boy that didn t behave
roll a boulder into the schoolroom from the yard and
sit on it. I didn t mind that. It bothered her more
than it did me. I d spread my handkerchief over it,
and then she d scold me, and I d tell her I had to put
my handkerchief on there, the rock was so hard."
Ted paused and took something from the bottom
of his wagon. " Here s an animile we killed over by
the woods this morning," said he, holding it up.
"A hedgehog, eh?" was Mr. Macey s comment.
" That reminds me of a ghost story. I suppose you
know what to say to a ghost ? " he inquired, looking
toward me.
No, I did not.
<c You want to say, c In the name o God, what do
you want o me? Then the ghost ll have to answer.
But what I was goin to tell about was a happenin*
years ago at a neighbor s by the name o Stetson.
In the Adirondacks 103
They heard a sound every night like sawing wood, in
the woodshed with a buck-saw."
"Did they?" Ted interrupted. "You bet your
life I d get up a lot of wood and let the ghost saw."
c< The people would look into the shed," his father
continued, "and there wa n t nothin there. Well,
that sawin kep* on, and every night the folks would
come from all around to hear it, and the Stetsons was
gettin pretty well scared. By and by I went one
night, and I heard the sawin 1 same as the rest, and we
took the light, and looked into the shed and couldn t
find nothin to cause the sound, high nor low. Then
I went outside, and just around the corner, what d I
find but a hedgehog, gnawing at an old barrel the
Stetsons had bought salt mackerel in ; and I threw
the barrel down into a brook that was close by, and
they never had no more trouble after that with any
ghost sawin* wood in their woodshed. You see it
sounded so like it was inside, no one never thought
to look outside before."
" Well, I don t wonder the people was frightened,"
said Mrs. Macey. " Even a little mouse will make a
horrid noise in the night."
" Yes," declared Ted, as he and his father emptied
the cut potatoes into the wagon, " and if you hear a
gray squirrel running through the leaves in the au
tumn, you d think a catamount was after you."
With this remark, Ted drove off, and not long after-
IO4 New England and its Neighbors
ward I left the farm-house, and began my day s tramp
ing. I became acquainted with a good many of the
mountain people, by the time my Adirondack trip
ended, and it seemed to me that their general intelli
gence was of a high order, and that, in spite of lack of
polish, they were sure to win the respect of any one
who was at all in sympathy with rural life. They
have not yet lost the pioneer flavor and are still
wrestling with nature in the woods far from railroads,
unaffected by cities and by the influx of foreign im
migrants. They are Yankees of a primitive sort that
has pretty much disappeared from New England.
Among them is a certain proportion of the shiftless
and unthrifty, but in the main I thought them hard
working and ambitious of bettering their condition.
Their language was picturesque and had its local tang,
but it was seldom grotesque and ignorant. In dress,
the men and boys were addicted to wearing felt hats,
which continued in use long after the bands frayed
and disappeared, and till these articles of apparel had
become shapeless and faded to the last degree, but
beautiful and harmonious with the environment, never
theless. The other work-day garments of the people
had the same earthy, elemental look, and were appar
ently never thrown away as long as thread and needle
and patches would make them hold together.
It was a pleasure to get acquainted with the children,
they were so modest and unsophisticated. I liked to
In the Adirondacks
105
watch the boys working in the fields and the gentle little
girls playing about the home yards. They get a good
elementary education in the district schools, and a
generous proportion of them continue their studies
at the academies in the large villages., and many after
that go to Albany and take a course in a business col
lege. As to the future of the Adirondack people, the
region impressed me as a fresh upland fountain of
human energy, certain to contribute much of its strength
to the town life of the nation in the days to come.
A Roadside Chat
V
THE HOME OF FENIMORE COOPER
On Cooperstown Street
IN 1785 William
Cooper, the novel
ist s father, visited
the rough, hilly country
in Otsego County of cen
tral New York. At that
time the region contained
no trace of any road and
not a single white inhabit
ant. " I was alone/ he
says, " three hundred
miles from .home, with
out bread, meat, or food
of any kind. My horse
fed on the grass that grew
by the edge of the waters.
I laid me down to sleep
in my watch-coat, noth
ing but the melancholy
wilderness around me."
Yet the pleasant landscape, the fertility of the soil,
and the fact that an estate here was his for the taking,
1 06
The Home of Fenimore Cooper 107
made him determine that this should be his abode.
At the southern end of Otsego Lake, where for a
century the Indian traders had been accustomed to
resort, he two years later laid out a village, and to this
spot he in 1790 brought his family.
The novelist was the eleventh of twelve children.
He was born in 1789, at Burlington, New Jersey,
the residence of his mother s people, and was taken
to Cooperstown when he was thirteen months old.
There he lived a healthy, natural, country life, sur
rounded by pioneer out-of-door influences that did
much to direct his tastes and shape his character.
The house in which he dwelt during his early boy
hood was an ordinary farm-house; but in 1798 his
father erected the good-sized mansion known to fame
as Otsego Hall. This stood on rising ground, facing
the lake, with the village clustering about it, and both
in its generous proportions and its situation was a fit
ting home for the town s founder and chief citizen.
The site of the old Hall is still the heart of the
town. The village has grown, but it huddles closest
on the narrow southern margin of the lake. Here is
a single, broad business street that runs square across
the valley of the lake-basin, and at either end is a
wooded bluff. From this main thoroughfare the
houses straggle away on various minor streets and
lanes. The place has many characteristics of a country
market town, but at the same time it contains numer-
io8 New England and its Neighbors
ous hotels, and frequent summer residences of city
people are scattered along its waterside suburbs. The
lake stretching away to the north is attractive and the
environment in general is agreeable, yet nature has not
been lavish enough in bestowing its charms to account
for the magnetism of the place as a vacation resort,
considering its comparative remoteness and inaccessi
bility. No doubt the magic of Cooper s name fur
nishes the real explanation, for the region is everywhere
redolent of him and his famous romances. In the
case of two of them the scenes are laid immediately
about the lake. " The Deerslayer " depicts the neigh
borhood as it was in 1745, prior to its settlement, when
all around was unbroken forest; while "The Pioneers"
is the story of the founding of Cooperstown. Topo
graphically the descriptions are very faithful, and spots
abound which can be easily identified with incidents of
the narratives.
The town was more than ordinarily lively on the
morning I arrived, for I chanced to be just in time to
witness quite an exodus of the more frothy, sporty, and
youthful of the inhabitants on their way to a circus
that was holding forth in a neighboring place. The
occasion was one of great prospective hilarity, and for
some of the crowd it would run into dissipation unless
the looks of the celebrators belied them. The situation
was most definitely presented by a man riding to the
station in a hotel bus. As the vehicle rumbled down
The Home of Fenimore Cooper 109
the street, he shouted, whenever he happened to see an
acquaintance : " You want to meet me at the depot to
night with a wagon ; and say you have the side
boards on ! Yes, don t forget the sideboards ! "
Looking toward the Town from an Eastern Hillslope
My rambling while I was at Cooperstown was
confined to a radius of a few miles. First, of course,
it took me to the green borders of the near lake in the
immediate vicinity of the village. The turf, dotted
with trees, descended unbroken almost to the water s
edge. Numerous wharves reached out from the shore,
most of them slight affairs giving access to a rowboat,
but two of them much longer and more substantial for
the accommodation of the pleasure steamers that make
constant trips up and down the lake through the
summer. On. the eastern verge of the village was
no New England and its Neighbors
the channel where the waters find a way to escape;
and they departed so gently and the tree-embowered
passage was so narrow it was not easy to realize that
here I beheld the source of the Susquehanna.
On this same side of the lake, just outside the town,
are pasture slopes, delightful at the time of my visit,
with cows grazing in the dandelion-spangled grass.
Down below, the shore was fringed with bushes, among
which were many "shad-berries" and "pin-cherries"
all ablow with white blossoms. The land on this
side of the lake as you go on farther rises in steep
ridges overgrown with woods ; and dwellings and
cultivated fields are infrequent. I preferred the other
side whenever I chose to take a long walk. It is more
pastoral, the slopes milder. I recall one afternoon s
walk on the western highway in particular. The new
leafage was getting well started, the grass was beginning
to .grow rank in the meadows, and the air was full of
bird-songs. Chipmunks and red squirrels chattered
among the trees and raced up and down the trunks
and through the branches with almost as much ease as
if they had wings. The prevalence of the streams, too,
contributed to the spring gayety. They were every
where, varying from tiny tricklings to lusty brooks
capable of turning the wheels of a small grist or saw
mill. Noise and haste were dominant traits, and they
coursed down the hills through channels littered with
rocks and pebbles, and made many a shining leap.
THE MARGIN OF THE LAKE
The Home of Fenimore Cooper in
I kept on for several miles. Sometimes the road
was close by the lake, sometimes well back up the
slopes. Once I made a detour and went down to the
water s edge across a swamp where flourished jungles
of poison ivy. At my approach a sandpiper fled with
thin-voiced protest in nervous flight along the shore,
and a profound-looking kingfisher gave a squeak and
adjourned to some nook more secluded. They might
have saved themselves the trouble of such exertion on
my account, for the wetness of the marsh and the
prevalence of the poison vines discouraged me, and I
was glad to beat a hasty retreat.
When I at length had gone northward as far as I
cared to and had turned back toward the town, I was
overtaken by a lumber wagon drawn by a heavy pair
of work-horses. The driver pulled up and asked me
to ride, and I accepted the invitation. The horses
never trotted, but they walked briskly enough to
keep the springless wagon constantly jolting, and the
ride was not altogether comfortable. Still, the change
was welcome, for the road was decidedly muddy.
" They ve been over it lately with the road-scraper,"
explained my companion, "and dragged in the dirt
from the sides. It s dirt that washed off from the
road, and it s all wore out and ain t fit for a road any
more, and the last rain we had just softened it into
pudding. This road was a plank road when I was a
little shaver. There was a lot of plank roads then*
112 New England and its Neighbors
They was very good when they was new, and we d
rattle along fine ten miles an hour the stage cal
culated to make. If you met a team you had to turn
off on the ground because the plank wa n t only long
enough for a single track, but the tops was laid level
with the ground, and that didn t matter. The greatest
trouble was that the plank got worn after a while and
the knots begun to stick out, and new planks put in
here and there helped make it more uneven kind o
shook you up then.
" This road was planked twenty-seven miles, all the
way to Fort Plain on the New York Central. That
was where we had to go whenever we wanted to get
to the railroad. It was a hard journey, especially at
the break-up of winter, when the stage was sometimes
much as two hours getting through part way on
wheels, and part way on runners, perhaps. We was
mighty glad, I can tell you, when this little branch
railroad that strikes in here from the south was
finally built. The plank roads was owned by private
companies, and there was toll gates every four or five
miles, but it was too costly keepin the plank in repair,
and by and by they pulled em up and put in gravel
turnpikes. Those didn t pay either, and so the com
panies went out of business and let the public fix their
own roads."
As the driver finished speaking, we were passing a
broad field on the farther side of which I could see
The Home of Fenimore Cooper i;
#=>
Putting on a Fresh Coat of Paint
three children wandering about and occasionally stoop
ing to pick something. cc What are they doing ? " I
asked
cc
;d.
Seem to be cutting dandelion greens," was the
i
H4 New England and its Neighbors
reply ; " but it s gettin rather past time for dande
lions, and they ll have to boil em in soda-water to
take the toughness out. Some use milkweeds for
greens. I like cowslops myself better than milkweed or
dandelions either. You take a nice mess of cowslop
greens in the spring, picked before they get in blossom,
while they re tender, and they re all-fired good."
" This is fine farm land we re driving through now,"
I suggested.
" Yes, it s all right. It don t pay for itself, though
but then it don t have to. You see that big house
down there in the trees. Belongs to a New York
lawyer. He s only got about twenty acres of land, and
yet he keeps three hired men. They raise some crops
and take care of a few critters, but mostly they re busy
just makin the place look nice. Almost every pretty
point of land along the shore here has got an expensive
house on it that some city man has put up, so he can
amuse himself by making a fad of fancy stock-farming
or something of the sort. Now we re comin opposite
another handsome place. The grounds front on the
road for half a mile, and the whole distance there s this
big stone wall. A stone wall s a thing a poor man
can t afford. It s an expensive fence, no matter how
you calculate always tumblin down, and brush and
vines always growin round it. This wall s as well
built as it could be, but the frost will heave it, and
every spring a couple of men spend a good many
GETTING READY TO PLANT HIS* GARDEN
The Home of Fenimore Cooper 115
days repairing of it. When it begins to pitch there
ain t nothing can save it, and they have to take the
bad places clean down to the foundation and lay em
over."
I continued on the lumber wagon not only as far as
the town, but a mile or two beyond, down a broad,
fertile farm valley. On the east side of the valley the
land rose in high slopes checkered with cultivated fields.
" The farther you go up the hills in that direction/
said the driver, " the thinner the soil gets, and an
American couldn t get a livin off n it; but there s
English from across the Atlantic that ll take that
high scrub land and clear it, and do well. That is,
they get to own their farms and have money at in
terest though they ain t satisfied no more n any one
else."
We passed several large hop fields, set full of tall
poles, at the foot of which were green outreachings of
vines. In one field were two women tying the strag
gling stems to the poles. " There ain t only a few got
at that job yet," remarked the driver. " Hops are a
great crop in this part of the state, but they ain t lookin
first-rate this year didn t stand the winter well and
a good many farmers are ploughing em up. They don t
pay as they used to. The price has been goin down
for a long time. You can t get a decent crop unless
you give up your best medder land to em and put
about all the manure your farm makes on em. So
n6 New England and its Neighbors
folks are givin em up and goin more into dairying.
There s a cheese factory at the village that they bring
their milk to, and that pays em on an average about
two cents and a half a quart.
"The time was when we got considerable money
out of our woodland, but the best lumber s pretty near
all gone now. Twenty years ago there was a tannery
a little below the town. It used a power o hemlock
bark, and lots o farmers would cut their hemlocks and
peel em and let the trees lie and rot. They don t
waste any good lumber that way any more. The
tannery went out of business long ago, and the build
ing was fixed over into a sawmill. It stands on a
crick that comes from the hills to the east. That
crick s about as boisterous a stream of its size as I
ever see. When we have a big rain it rises right up
and tears everything all to pieces. At first the saw
mill was run by water-power, but the crick carried off
the dam so often, they finally got tired of rebuilding it
and put in steam. They burn the old waste to run
their engine sawdust and everything and so it
don t cost much gettin up their steam."
Presently I inquired about the town as it was in
Cooper s time. I wish you could a talked with my
father," was the response. "He knew all about it.
Twas just an ordinary little country town a few
stores, and a couple o* churches, and two wooden
taverns, and about all the rest of it was farm-houses.
The Home of Fenimore Cooper
117
Twa n t built up the way it is at present. I know
father told how a hill that s now got houses all over it
was in them days outside the town a hundred rods or
so, and it was covered with pines. When a horse died
they d drag the carcass up there and let it lay, and
Spring Work in a Farm Field
think they d got it well out of the way. They used
to call that hill c The Horse Heaven/
" I don t think Cooper left his family in very good
circumstances. His daughters was very nice real
ladies, and they was very charitable, and give away
an awful sight, so t I do know but they most suffered
themselves. They made kind of a hobby out of the
n8 New England and its Neighbors
orphanage here, for one thing. You d have an idea
that Cooper s books would bring considerable to the
family long after he was dead, but they say he sold
a good many of em outright, and after his death there
wasn t much in money ever come in from J em."
Although Cooper s home town is very closely identi
fied with him, he did not always reside there, and he
was a good deal of a rover in his early life. At the
age of nine he went to Albany, where he attended
school for four years, and then entered Yale, the next
to the youngest student in the college. He won no
laurels at Yale, for the woods and fields possessed for
him a far keener attraction than books, and his poor
standing, added to some boyish prank in the third year
of his course, led to his dismissal. His father now sent
him to sea before the mast on a merchantman. This
was intended as a preparation for later going into the
navy, which he entered as a midshipman at the age of
nineteen. He served until he was twenty-two, when
he resigned his commission and married.
Meanwhile his father had died, and in the family
home at Cooperstown dwelt his mother and older
brother. Cooper himself lived in New York, Phila
delphia, and other places, and spent the eight years
preceding 1834 abroad. When he returned, Otsego
Hall became his permanent residence. The dwelling
had hitherto been a simple, commodious village house,
but he remodelled it, added a wooden battlement,
THE MONUMENT ON THE SITE OF OTSEGO HALL
The Home of Fenimore Cooper 119
threw out porches and projections, changed the win
dows to the Gothic style, and gave the whole structure
an air that bore some resemblance to the ancestral
home of an English country gentleman.
Here he kept open house to his friends, cultivated
his garden, and wrote. Here also he became involved
in that curious series of lawsuits that resulted in many
years of bickering. He came back from Europe to
our raw, new country, and expressed with great frank
ness his impressions of his native land, and these were
not at all flattering there was so much pretension,
so much that was crude and ungenuine, and he spoke
with especial severity of the capricious vulgarity of
the newspapers. The public, always oversensitive to
criticism, became more and more irritated. Then came
the Three Mile* Point controversy between Cooper and
his fellow-townsmen, which brought on a general storm
of denunciation.
The Point which caused the disturbance is an attrac
tive wooded ledge jutting out into the lake from the
western shore three miles above Cooperstown. It
had long been in common use as a picnic ground,
and the townsfolk had begun to feel that it was pub
lic property and that no one had any business to inter
fere with their continued appropriation of it. But the
ownership was in the Cooper family, and the novelist,
with his aristocratic notions about private estates, ab
sorbed during his long residence abroad, wished to have
120 New England and its Neighbors
his ownership recognized. He had no desire to de
prive the people of their picnic place. He only wanted
them to ask such use as a privilege, not take it as a
right. To effect this end he published a card warning
the public against trespassing. As a consequence a
mass meeting was convened, at which it was resolved
to hold Cooper s threat and his whole conduct "in
perfect contempt/ to have his books removed from
the village library, and to " denounce any man as a
sycophant, who has, or shall, ask permission of
James F. Cooper to visit the Point in question."
Cooper fought with vigor and persistence what he
deemed the unreasonableness of his neighbors, but
his victory was never complete, and he finally dropped
the matter, and the public used Three Mile Point
again unconditionally. This was hot, however, the
end of the trouble. It had been given wide notoriety
by the newspapers, and their comments were so per
sonal and offensive that Cooper was stirred to institute
many libel suits against them. Such was his inde
pendence, his pugnaciousness, and quick temper that
he kept up the warfare for years. Yet this interfered
but little with the tranquillity of his home life. He
was closely bound to his family, and was always
warmly affectionate ; and though he had his enemies,
he was much liked by those who knew him well, and
he never failed to win the regard of the men who
worked for him. Two miles to the north, on the
The Home of Fenimore Cooper 121
eastern side of the lake, he bought a farm and built
on it a cottage of the Swiss type. He named the
place " The Chalet " and entered with great enjoy
ment into the superintendence of clearing and improv
ing the land, extracting stumps, setting out trees,
raising crops, and rearing poultry. He was particu
larly interested in his live stock, and the animals knew
and followed him in recognition of the kindness of his
treatment.
It was customary for the family to breakfast at nine,
dine at three, and have tea at seven in the evening.
The novelist rose two hours before breakfast and
began writing, and after the morning meal resumed
his pen until eleven. The rest of the day was free
to other pursuits. For recreation he frequently went
out on the lake in his boat a skiff with a lug sail.
This rude little craft went along very well before the
breeze, but was of not much use in beating to wind
ward. It was, however, quite to its owner s liking,
and was conducive to leisurely contemplation, and in
it he doubtless thought out many a stirring chapter for
his books. Cooper never kept a carriage ; a horse and
buggy sufficed instead and served him when he chose
to drive up to " The Chalet." This was a trip he
made nearly every day after he finished his literary
work, for a stay of two or three hours.
His habits were methodical, and he seldom allowed
anything to keep him from his desk during the morn-
122 New England and its Neighbors
ing hours. He composed with ease and never lacked
for words or for subjects ; yet authorship was in his
case purely an accident, and he was thirty when he
began his first book. This book was the outcome of
his remarking to his wife one evening as he threw
down impatiently a recent novel he had been reading
aloud, " I could write you a better book myself."
She laughed at the absurdity of the idea and
challenged him to undertake the task. Hitherto he
had disliked even to write a letter, but now he set
arduously to work and finished several chapters. Then
he would have quit had not his wife become interested
and urged him on; and presently "Precaution" was
not only finished, but published. It was merely an
imitation of the average English story of fashionable
life. Yet it revealed to Cooper an unexpected capacity,
and he at once began a thoroughly original Ameri
can story " The Spy," which has been called " the
first brilliantly successful romance" published in this
country.
Cooper s death occurred in 1851, and his wife sur
vived him only a few months. Otsego Hall was then
sold, an extra story was added, and it was turned
into a hotel. A heavy insurance was placed on the
property and with very little delay it burned, after a
manner that heavily insured buildings sometimes have
of doing. The site of the old Hall is now a pleasing
park, and where the house stood is a striking monu-
The Home of Fenimore Cooper
123
ment, but It seems a pity the house itself could not
have been preserved just as Cooper left it. The
novelist lies buried in the tree-shadowed quiet of a
near churchyard, and the much-worn path to his grave,
trodden by thousands of pilgrim feet, attests his abid
ing fame.
The Graves of J. Fenimore Cooper and his Wife
VI
AN HISTORIC TOWN IN CONNECTICUT
M
f acquaint
ance with
Saybrook
began rather unpro
pitiously at its, one
hotel. This was a
shapeless yellow
structure, evidently an
old residence some
what remodelled and
enlarged. Its busiest
portion was the bar
room adorned with
a heavy cherry coun
ter and an imposing
array of bottles on
Setting out the House-plants the shelves behind.
When I entered the adjoining office, several men were
in the bar-room running over their vocabularies of
swear words In a high-voiced dispute ; and in the office
124
An Historic Town in Connecticut
125
itself sat two young fellows drowsing in drunken stu
por. The whole place was permeated with the odors
Saybrook Street
of liquor and with tobacco fumes, both recent and of
unknown antiquity.
But if the aspect of local life as seen at the hotel
w r as depressing, the village, on the evening I arrived,
was to my eyes quite entrancing. In the May twilight
I walked from end to end of the long chief street.
The birds were singing, and from the seaward marshes
came the piping of the frogs and the purring monotone
of the toads. Lines of great elms and sugar maples
shadowed the walks, and the latter had blossomed so
that every little twig had its tassels of delicate yellow-
green, and a gentle fragrance filled the air. Among
126 New England and its Neighbors
other trees, a trifle retired, were many pleasant homes of
the plain but handsome and substantial type in vogue
about a century ago. In short, the place furnished an
admirable example of the old New England country
town, and imparted a delightful sense of repose and
comfort.
The most incongruous feature of the village was an
abnormal, modern schoolhouse that in its decorative
trickery matched nothing else on the street. From this
it was a relief to turn to the white, square-towered old
church neighboring, which gave itself no airs and cut no
capers with architectural frills and fixings. On its front
was a bronze plate informing the reader that here was
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST
IN SAYBROOK
ORGANIZED
IN "THE GREAT HALL" OF THE FORT
IN THE SUMMER OF 1646
Thus it was one of the earliest founded churches in
the commonwealth.
An odd thing about the town, and one that rather
offset its sentiment of antiquity, was the omnipresence
of bicycles. Everybody old and young, male and
female rode this thoroughly modern contrivance.
Pedestrianism had apparently gone out of fashion, and
I got the idea that the children learned to ride a wheel
before they began to walk.
An Historic Town in Connecticut 127
Another odd thing was that the village looked
neither agricultural nor suburban. It is in truth the
dwelling-place of a country aristocracy possessed of a
good deal of wealth, and labor is not very strenuous.
The people are content if they have sufficient capital
safely invested to return them a comfortable living and
save them the necessity for undue exertion. Yet, to
quote a native, " They are nothing like as rich as they
were fifty years ago."
Much money has been lost in one way and another.
The decrease, however, is more due to removals and
to the division of large individual properties among
several heirs. But, whatever the ups and downs of
fortune, the town apparently changes slowly, and the
inhabitants cling to the customs of their forefathers.
One evidence of this was the retention of miles and
miles of unnecessary fences about the dwellings, some
of them of close boards, suggestive of monastic seclu-
siveness.
The oldest house in the town that still presents in
the main its original aspect dates back to 1665. ^ ls
painted a dingy yellow, and has a high front, from
which the rear roof takes a long slant downward, until
the eaves are within easy reach, and you have to stoop
to go in at the back door. The windows have the
tiny panes of the time when the dwelling was erected.
The rooms all have warped floors, and low ceilings
crossed by great beams ; and the heavy vertical timbers
n8 New England and its Neighbors
assert themselves in the corners. The upper story has
only two apartments finished. As was usual in houses
of this kind, the rest was left simply garret space bare
to the rafters. In the heart of the structure is an
enormous chimney that on the ground floor takes up
the space of a small room. There are fireplaces on
three sides, but their days of service are past, though
they never have been closed except with fireboards.
In a Back Yard
At the rear of the house, under an apple tree, were
two vinegar barrels, each of which had an inverted
bottle stuck in the bung-hole. The contents of the
barrels, in their cider state, had been allowed to freeze
and then were drained off. A highly concentrated
beverage was in this manner obtained, much esteemed
An Historic Town in Connecticut 129
by the well-seasoned cider-lover. I was offered a
chance to make the acquaintance of the liquor, yet not
without warning that, as it was almost pure alcohol,
there was some danger of overdoing the matter.
To the north of the town one does not have to fol
low the highways far to encounter country that, with
all the years passed since the settlement of the region,
is still only half tamed. Here are rocky hills, brushy
pastures, and rude stone walls overgrown with poison
ivy. Many of the homes are ancient and dilapidated
and the premises strewn with careless litter. Work is
carried on in a primitive fashion. A landowner of
this district with whom I talked affirmed that farm
ing did not pay, and the reason he gave was the com
petition of the West it had knocked the bottom out
of prices.
I wondered if there were not other reasons. He was
furrowing out a half-acre patch on which he intended
to plant potatoes. His hired man was leading the horse
while he himself held the plough-handles. It seemed
to me his patch was not large enough to work eco
nomically with a view to profit, and that the profit was
also being dissipated by having two men do work that
might be done by one. Down the slope was a long
stretch of marshes that swept away to the sea, with a
muddy-banked creek wandering through the level.
The man said he would cut salt hay on these marshes
later in the year, and as the soil was too boggy to bear
&
ijo New England and Its Neighbors
the weight of a horse, not only would the mowing have
to be done by hand, but he and his helper would be
obliged to carry the hay to firm land between them on
poles. Here, again, it was not easy to discern much
Ploughing out for Potatoes
chance for profit. The process was too laborious
where the product was of so little value. Then, at the
man s home, I noted that the stable manure lay leach
ing in the sun and rain, unprotected by any roof, that
the mowing-machine and other tools were scattered
about the yard accumulating rust, and that things
in general looked careless and easy-going. I did
not wonder he took a pessimistic view of farming.
The places of many of his neighbors were akin to
Ms, and as a whole this outlying district seemed a piece
An Historic Town in Connecticut
131
out of the past when farming was done by main strength.,
and brains and method and science were quite secondary.
This old-fashioned aspect was further emphasized by
the presence of an occasional slow ox-team toiling in
the fields, and now and then an antiquated well-sweep
in a dooryard.
A well-sweep was an adjunct of one house in the town
i tse lf a gray, square little house far gone in decay.
Lights were missing from the windows, clapboards were
dropping off, blinds were dilapidated or gone altogether,
and the outbuildings had either fallen and been used for
stove wood, or were on the verge of ruin. The shed
used as a hen-house leaned at a perilous slant. Near
A Roadway on the Saybrook Outskirts
it was a scanty pile of wood and a sawhorse made by
nailing a couple of sticks crosswise on the end of a box
so that the tops projected above the box level and
New England and its Neighbors
formed a crotch. Along the street walk staggered a
decrepit picket fence with a sagging gate. The yard
was a chaos of weeds and riotous briers, and the place
looked mysterious as if it had a history perhaps
was haunted.
A tiny path led around to the back door, so slightly
trodden I was in doubt whether the house was inhab
ited or not until I saw a bent old woman coming
from the grass field at the rear of the premises. On
her head she wore a sunbonnet of ancient type and
over her shoulders a faded shawl. She was hobbling
slowly along with the help of a cane, and bore on her
arm a basket with a few dandelion greens in the bottom.
I stood leaning on the fence, hoping chance would give
me an opportunity to know more about this strange
house; and to avoid an appearance of staring I now
looked the other way. But my loitering had attracted
the woman s attention, and, instead of going into the
house, she set her basket on the back door-step and
came feebly down the path and spoke to me. She was
a mild-eyed, kindly old soul, and in the chat which
followed I learned that she was eighty years old and
that her brother, aged seventy-six, the only other mem
ber of the household, was a "joiner/ Presently I
asked about some of the garden flowers which had
survived in their neglected struggle with weeds and
brambles,
" They need the old woman," she said, " but I m
An Historic Town in Connecticut 133
most past such work now. My lameness is getting
worse. I have it every winter, and it doesn t leave
me until warm weather comes. I shall have to get
my brother to hoe some here. He isn t much for
taking care of flowers, but he likes em as well as any
one, and if he s going to make a call, he ll pick a
bunch to carry along. I used to have more kinds,
and I d keep some of em in the house through the
winter, but when I did that I had to see the fire didn t
go out nights, and it got too hard for me.
" What are those white flowers spreading all through
the grass ? " I inquired.
"Those are myrtle white myrtle. Want one?"
My reply was affirmative, and I was invited into the
yard. I picked a myrtle blossom and the old woman
said, " You can have more just as well."
" Thank you, one will do ; and what are these little
flowers at my feet ? "
" Those are bluebottles. I got the first plants from
my cousin s up in Tolland County, Want one ? "
" Yes, I believe I would like one."
" Take more if you care to."
" No, I d rather have just the one. Here are some
pink flowers in a bunch. What are they ? "
" Those are polyanthus. You can have a root to
take home with you if you can carry it."
Thus our talk rambled on, while we considered
double violets, " daffies," bloodroot, mandrakes.
New England and its Neighbors
" chiny asters," tiger lilies, " pineys," tulips, hyacinths,
etc. The garden had formerly been very tidy, and I
could trace its decorative arrangement of beds and
paths. The borders of the beds were outlined with
rows of big " winkle " shells which the brother had
brought up from the seashore a mile or two distant,
where he sometimes went " clamming and oystering."
Close about the house were blue and yellow lilies,
bunches of ferns, and a good deal of shrubbery, includ
ing roses, a "honeysuckle" bush, and a tall "lilack."
This last carried its blossoms so high that they were
far beyond the woman s reach as she stood on the
ground, and she only picked such as she could gather
from an upper window. Near the back door was a
big butternut tree, and a grape-vine overrunning a
shaky trellis. Here, too, was the well-sweep with its
rickety curb and its oaken bucket.
I was made welcome to step inside the house and
see the old dwelling, but I did not find it especially
interesting. The barren, cluttered rooms, with their
suggestion of extreme poverty, were depressing. In
the parlor, which was used as a sort of storeroom, were
a number of antiquated pictures on the walls, most of
them in heavy frames that the woman had contrived
herself some of cones, some of shells stuck in putty.
The cones and shells varied much in size and kind,
and the patterns were intricate and ingenious. Then
there was a specimen of hair work, dusty and moth-
DRAWING A BUCKET OF WATER
An Historic Town in Connecticut 135
eaten, which she took out of its frame that I might in
spect it closer. "I used to be quite a hand making these
sort of things," she explained, " but now I don t have
the time. It s about all I can do to get enough to
eat."
I came away wondering what the trouble was that
the brother and sister were so poorly provided for in
their old age, and when I inquired about it I was told
that the brother was "one of the smartest men in
Connecticut," an architect and builder of great ability,
but " he had looked through the bottom of a glass too
often."
The most historic portion of Saybrook is what is
known as " The Point," a seaward-reaching projection a
half-mile across, connected with the mainland by a nar
row neck. Here the first settlers established themselves
in 1635. The leaders who had planned this settlement
had in October of that year reached Boston from across
the sea. In Boston they collected twenty men, hired
a small vessel, and about the middle of November
posted off for the mouth of the Connecticut. They
brought with them materials for the erection of houses
to accommodate both themselves and others who were
to follow ; and they were prepared to construct a fort,
in part to prevent the Dutch, who aspired to control
the river, from accomplishing their purpose, and in
part to defend themselves against the Indians.
They arrived none too soon; for a few days after
136 New England and its Neighbors
they landed, a vessel from New Amsterdam appeared
off shore with intent to take possession of the region
and build fortifications. Luckily the English had
mounted a couple of cannon, and the Dutch thought
best to return peaceably whence they had come.
Winter soon set in, and the settlers could do little
beforehand save to provide themselves with shelters
of the most primitive kind. In the spring work was
taken up in earnest, and other settlers came ; but for a
long time the colony grew very slowly, and the earliest
years were years of annual struggle with the stubborn
earth and the hard winters. One of the first tasks of
the pioneers was to build a wooden fort and to set up
a line of palisades twelve feet high across the neck of
the peninsula. Like all the early towns, Saybrook
suffered at the hands of the Indians. A number of
its inhabitants were slain in the immediate vicinity, and
the cows sometimes returned from the pasture with
arrows sticking in their sides.
By 1647, while the population was still less than
one hundred, a church was erected. Up to that time
the meetings had been held in what the records speak
of as cc the great hall " of the fort. The church stood
at one end of a public square called "The Green."
To assemble the people for service a drum was beaten,
and it was voted that at the front door of the church
should be " a gard of 8 men every Sabbath and
Lecture-day compleat in their arms." A sentinel, too.
An Historic Town in Connecticut
was stationed on a turret or platform built on the
meeting-house roof. The necessity of this protection
against savage assaults is seen when one remembers
that an average of over fourscore English are esti
mated to have been slain yearly by the Indians during
the first half-century of Connecticut s settlement.
In the Old Cemetery
This seems distressing enough, but from an Indian
viewpoint the slaughter was far worse ; for twenty of
their number were killed to one of the whites.
A second meeting-house was completed in 1681
near the site of the first. Of this structure it is known
that the seats in the body of the house were plain
wooden benches assigned to members of the congrega-
138 New England and its Neighbors
tion according to age, rank, office, and estate. Several
leading men were given permission to build square
pews against the walls of the audience room, and the
minister s family had a square pew at the right of the
pulpit. The pulpit itself was a high, angular construc
tion furnished with a Geneva Bible, a " Bay Psalm
Book, 1 and an hour-glass with which to time the service.
The two deacons faced the congregation, sitting on a
seat at the base of the pulpit, and the tithing-man,
with his fox-tail rod of office, took his position where
he could best oversee the behavior of the worshippers.
The original settlement at Saybrook Point about the
fort gradually overflowed to the mainland, until pres
ently the centre of population and chief village were a
mile or two from the earlier hamlet. Thus, when the
third church was built, in 1726, at a cost of sixteen hun
dred dollars, a new and more generally convenient loca
tion was chosen. Until near the end of the century this
edifice had no steeple and no bell. After these were
added it was customary, down to 1840, to ring the bell
every noon to announce to the people the arrival of the
dinner hour. The bell was also rung during the winter
at nine in the evening as a notification it was bedtime.
Neither of the previous churches were ever warmed, nor
was this for more than one hundred years. The chief
feature of the interior was the high pulpit, overhung
by a huge sounding-board, both much elaborated with
panels and mouldings. On Sunday the pulpit stairs
An Historic Town in Connecticut 139
were filled by small boys, who were always eager to get
the upper step, for this position gave the occupant the
honor of opening the pulpit door to the minister when
he ascended to his place. The pews were square, with
seats on three sides, so that a portion of the worshippers
sat with sides or backs to the preacher. A wide, heavy
gallery extended clear around the room except on the
north, where rose the pulpit. The east wing of the
gallery was exclusively for females, the west for males.
The front tier of seats was reserved for the singers.
Behind them, on the south side, were four box pews re
garded by many as most desirable sittings. Some of the
young people of both sexes found these especially attrac
tive, though more because the seclusion was adapted
for social purposes than because of any religious ardor.
Finally, in each of the remote rear corners of the gal
lery was still another box pew for the occupancy of the
colored people, who were not allowed to sit elsewhere.
Perhaps Saybrook s strongest appeal to fame is the
fact that the town was the first domicile of Yale Uni
versity. It was characteristic of the settlers of New
England, that no sooner had they set up their houses on
American soil than they began to make provision for the
education of their children. Not content with estab
lishing primary schools, they founded Harvard College
within seven years of the settlement of Boston, Con
necticut, in proportion to its population and means,
bore its full share in Harvard s support ; but after the
140 New England and its Neighbors
lapse of some fifty years the people of the colony be-
gan to feel the need of having a collegiate school of
their own. The idea took definite form at a meeting
of Connecticut pastors in September, 1701, when each
one present made a gift of books to the proposed
college.
The infant institution, which, in honor of a generous
benefactor, subsequently took the name of Yale, was
thus started, and shortly a citizen of Saybrook gave it
the use of a house and lot. This house was quite
sufficient, for during the first six months the college
community consisted of the president and a single
student, and only fifty-five young men were graduated
in fifteen years. The trustees were far from unani
mous in locating the college at Saybrook, and its
affairs continued in an unsettled state until 1716, when
it was transferred to New Haven. The change was
not accomplished without turmoil, a curious account
of which is found in the Rev. Samuel Peters s "General
History of Connecticut," published in 1781. He
says:
" A vote passed at Hartford, to remove the College
to Weathersfield ; and another at Newhaven, that it
should be removed to that town. Hartford, in order
to carry its vote into execution, prepared teams, boats,
and a mob, and privately set off for Saybrook, and
seized upon the College apparatus, library and students,
and carried all to Weathersfield. This redoubled the
iSii^i ^i- 4i *i \
CLEANING UP THE BACK YARD
An Historic Town in Connecticut 141
jealousy of the saints at Newhaven, who thereupon
determined to fulfil their vote ; and accordingly, having
collected a mob sufficient for the enterprise, they set
out for Weathersfield, where they seized by surprise the
students, library, &c. &c. But on the road to New-
haven, they were overtaken by the Hartford mob,
who, however, after an unhappy battle, were obliged
to retire with only a part of the library and part of the
students. The quarrel increased daily, everybody
expecting a war ; and no doubt such would have been
the case had not the peacemakers of Massachusetts
Bay interposed with their usual friendship, and advised
their dear friends of Hartford to give up the College
to Newhavoi. This was accordingly done to the great
joy of the crafty Massachusetts, who always greedily
seek their own prosperity, though it ruin their best
neighbors, v
" The College being thus fixed forty miles further
west from Boston than it was before, tended greatly to
the interest of Harvard College ; for Saybrook and
Hartford, out of pure grief, sent their sons to Harvard,
instead of the College at Newhaven."
Another anecdote related by Mr. Peters has to do
with the visit of the evangelist George Whitefield to
Saybrook in 1740. "Time not having destroyed the
walls of the fort/ says the narrative, " Mr. Whitefield
attempted to bring them down, as Joshua brought
down the walls of Jericho, to convince the gaping
142 New England and its Neighbors
multitude of his divine mission. He walked several
times round the fort with prayer, and rams -horns
blowing; he called on the angel of Joshua; but the
angel was deaf or on a journey or asleep, and therefore
the walls remained. Hereupon George cried aloud :
* This town is accursed for not receiving the messenger
of the Lord ; therefore the angel is departed and the
walls shall stand as a monument of sinful people.
He shook off the dust of his feet against them, and
departed/
The author of the u General History " was a Royalist
clergyman driven by persecution from the colonies
early in the Revolution. He writes with a certain
amount of sarcasm and bitterness, yet the book is
by no means wholly condemnatory. He apparently
attempts to be fair, though his own experience and his
affinity with the English Church gives a bias to his
opinions. The part of his book which has been most
severely criticised is where he gives a list of Connecti
cut "blue laws, that is bloody laws/ which he affirms
were strenuously enforced though never printed, and
those who transgressed them were punished with
excommunication, fines, banishment, whippings, ear-
cropping, tongue-burning, and even death. I quote
only a few of these alleged blue laws,
" No one shall run on the Sabbath-day, or walk in
his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from
^meeting.
An Historic Town in Connecticut 143
" No one shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or
fasting-day.
" The Sabbath shall begin at sunset on Saturday.
" Whoever wears cloathes trimmed with gold, silver,
or bone lace, above two shillings by the yard, shall be
presented by the grand jurors.
" A debtor in prison, swearing he has no estate shall
be let out and sold to make satisfaction.
" Whoever brings cards or dice into this dominion
shall pay a fine of 5/.
"No one shall read Common-Prayer, keep Christ
mas or Saints-days, make minced pies, dance, play
cards, or play on any instrument of music, except the
drum, trumpet, and jewsharp.
" No man shall court a maid in person, or by letter,
without first obtaining the consent of her parents.
" Every male shall have his hair cut round according
to a cap/
This last law, Mr. Peters says, was the cause of all
New Englanders being given the nickname of " pump
kin-heads." It frequently was convenient, he adds,
when caps were lacking, to substitute the hard shell
of a pumpkin, " w T hich being put on the head every
Saturday, the hair is cut by the shell all round the
head." The author s comment is that there is much
"prudence" in this method of hair-trimming, for: "first,
it prevents the hair from snarling ; secondly, it saves
the use of combs, bags, and ribbons ; thirdly, the hair
144 New E n gl anc * ancl its Neighbors
cannot incommode the eyes by falling over them ; and
fourthly, such persons as have lost their ears for heresy
and other wickedness, cannot conceal their misfortune
and disgrace."
Other paragraphs from the "General History" pur
porting to show the life of early Connecticut are
these :
" On Saturday evenings the people look sour and
sad; on the Sabbath they appear to have lost their
dearest friends, and are almost speechless ; they
walk softly ; they even observe it with more exact
ness than did the Jews. A Quaker preacher told
them with much truth that they worshipped the Sab
bath, and not the God of the Sabbath. These hos
pitable people, without charity, condemned the Quaker
as a blasphemer of the holy Sabbath, fined, tarred and
feathered him, put a rope about his neck, and plunged
him into the sea, but he escaped with life, though he
was about seventy years of age.
"In 1750 an Episcopal clergyman, born and edu
cated in England, who had been in holy orders above
twenty years, once broke their sabbatical law by comb
ing a discomposed lock of hair on the top of his wig ;
at another time for making a humming noise, which
they call whistling ; at a third, by running into church
when it rained ; at a fourth, by walking in his
garden and picking a bunch of grapes : for which
several crimes he had warrants granted against him,
An Historic Town in Connecticut 145
was seized, brought to trial, and paid a considerable
sum of money.
" Smuggling is rivetted in the constitution and
practice of the inhabitants of Connecticut as much as
superstition and religion, and their province is a
storehouse for the smugglers of the neighboring col
onies. They conscientiously study to cheat the King
of those duties which they say God and Nature never
intended should be paid. From the Governor down
to the tithing-man who are sworn to support the laws,
they will aid smugglers, resist collectors, and mob
informers."
The writer s view of the colonial clergy is far from
flattering. When a church gives a man a call and
states the salary and other inducements, the prospec
tive pastor, " after looking round him and finding no
better terms offered from any other parish, answers in
this manner, Brethren and friends, I have considered
your call, and, after many fastings and prayers, I find it
to be a call of God, and close with your offer. "
The pastor s manner of visiting persons who are ill
is described thus : " The minister demands of the sick
if he be converted, when, and where. If the answer is
conformable to the system of the minister, it is very
well ; if not, the sick is given over as a non-elect and
no object of prayer. Another minister is then sent
for, who asks the sick if he be willing to die, if he be
willing to be damned, if it please God to damn him ?
146 New England and its Neighbors
Should he answer No, this minister quits him, as the
former. Finally the sick man dies s and so falls out
of their hands into better."
In all this a touch of exaggeration is evident,, yet
there is enough of fact and of human nature behind
it to make the reader enjoy its spice, and the narrative
is far from unpalatable at least to readers who are not
natives of Connecticut.
The Seaward Marshlands
VII
A JAUNT ON LONG ISLAND
pft^
Starting the Garden Parsnips
F
i ROM New
York, one hot
day in May, I
journeyed almost the
full length of Long
Island s low levels ;
and so utterly lacking
were hills and vales
that I could not help
fancying the entire
isle had originally
been mere mud flats,
the delta of some
great river. The soil
was evidently mellow
and easily cultivated,
and I had glimpses
from the car windows
of many prosperous-looking market-garden farms ; but
not less characteristic were the monotonous stretches
147
148 New England and its Neighbors
of waste lands growing to pines and scrubby oaks.
These \\ere often uninterrupted for miles, and when a
break occurred, it was only to allow* for a village oasis
with a ragged skirting of fields, and then the dwarfish
forest s\\ept on again. The woods were dry, and truant
fires were burning in them, sometimes so near I could
see the low, irregular lines of the flames, sometimes
distant and only made apparent by a cloud-drift of
yellow smoke.
I went as far as Easthampton, a place I had selected
for my destination solely because I had heard there
were windmills in or near it not our ugly modern
ones, with angular skeleton frames and a whirligig of
shutters at the top, but those of the portly Dutch
type, that spread to the wind long, white-sailed arms.
To harmonize w r ith these windmills I had in mind an
old-fashioned rural town, in whose quiet the past would
seem more real than the present. I was disappointed.
The town has been invaded by the city people, and is
suburban rather than rural, and the old survives only
in nooks and corners ; and yet the place is beautiful.
It has a straight, broad, two-mile street, lined with well-
grown elms, and where the early town centre had been
the street widens into a grassy common. The sea lies
just beyond sight, hidden by a bulwark of dunes, but
its muffled roar along the beach can be distinctly heard.
The common at one end dips down to a muddy
pond, and on the steep, short slope rising east of the
A Lose ISLAND STILE
A Jaunt on Long Island 149
pond is a cemetery of lowly gray stones. As soon as
you pass across the burial-ground you find a windmill
a great octagon, with unpainted, shingled sides, and
four wide-reaching arms. The wincWill fulfilled my
ideal very satisfactorily, and its situation adjoining the
ancient cemetery was charming. AH it lacked was
motion, and I learned with regret it w r as not likely to
have that for several days.
" These mills don t grind much but hog feed/ said
my informant, " and there ain t but mighty little busi
ness doing at this season. The West raises our grain
supplies now and we buy em ready ground, but the
windmills used to be pretty important institutions,
You see there ain t any water-power worth mentioning
in this flat country, and in the old advertisements when
a place was for sale they d mention how far it was from
a windmill, just as they would at present from the post
office and railroad,"
At the very end of the street to the north was
another windmill, and on a side way was a third, minus
arms, while a fourth, that looked outwardly the best
of all, stood in the back yard of a gentleman s place.
This last mill, however, was only a delusion a fad of
its city owner. It was naught but an imitation shell,
fitted up to serve as a home for a hired man, and its
great arms never bore sails, nor could the wind coax
them Into motion even when it blew a hurricane.
Of the evolution of the town into what it is at
150 New England and its Neighbors
present I received a most entertaining view from a
man I accosted who was scratching up leaves and rub
bish by the path side in front of his premises with
a rake. He was in no haste, and talking seemed to
suit him rather better than the work in hand.
" It s twenty-seven years ago that the first city
family rented a house here," said he. " Now the
town is become one of the city people s resorts, and
it s full of houses they have either put up or that they
rent. Their houses are built in city style, and the old
farm-houses have about all been done away with or so
made over you wouldn t know em. Yes, farming s
dying out, and I expect soon you won t see a load of
manure go through the street in a whole season.
" The original inhabitants find themselves swallowed
up in the deluge, and I must say we re a little dis
mayed at the transformation. We re old-fashioned
enough not to quite like it. We used to do as we
pleased. There was a time when, if we thought a
person needed a coat of tar and feathers, we saw that
he had it. Twouldn t be allowed now. The city
people are getting so that they direct all our ways
almost tell us when to go to bed and when to get up
in the morning.
" I rent my house from the middle of June to the
middle of October for six hundred dollars. Some o
the neighbors rent theirs for less, others for more, even
up to twenty-five hundred. I have to move out when
A Jaunt on Long Island 151
the city folks come, but that little house you see in
back there is good enough for me; and I sell the
renters chickens, eggs, and garden truck, and it ain t
much trouble to make a living. There s more money
in renting than there is in taking boarders. Boarding
ain t fashionable here. I ll tell you why. One o*
these city women that has stopped here makes a call
there in New York, and says she spent last summer
down at Easthampton.
" c Did you, and what cottage did you have ? * says
the other.
* cc Oh, we didn t have a cottage. We boarded.
" c M-m-m, ah ! Well, you needn t call any more.
" At least that s what it amounts to. There s a good
deal of caste feeling, and renters don t want to associate
too freely with boarders. I expect pretty soon they
won t go in bathing here on the beach at the same place.
" We ve had a great excitement in the town the last
few months over a kind of epidemic of sickness. Our
two doctors don t agree what it is, and one of *em has
doctored for typhoid and the other for malaria. Neither
of em has lost a patient, and the undertaker has been
kicking all winter because the people didn t die faster
said he couldn t make a living the way things were
going. Well, the town is rent in twain, and each doc
tor has his party. There s most feeling though against
the typhoid man. You see the promulgation of his
theory would tend to keep the city people away.
IC2 Xew England and Its Neighbors
^ We couldn t stand that. They re the mainstay of
the town, because, as I said, farming s pretty much
played out. It used to be different, and von have no
On Kuathainptun Curnniun
what crops we d raise. The soil s nothing to brag
of, but we d put on enormous quantities of bunkers ;
that s a kind of fish I suppose you know what they
are. We could go down to the sea anywhere and drag
in our seines full of them bunkers, and then we d cover
the land till it glistened all over with *em ; and how
they would stink ! I can remember times when, on a
hot Sunday, we d have to close the meeting-house
to keep out the stench.
1 wish that meeting-house was here now. It was
A Jaunt on Long Island 153
a handsome old church, but it got too small, and
instead of enlarging it, they must build a new one in
up-to-date style. You can see the doorstone of the old
church yet, embedded in the sidewalk down below here
a ways. There s a curious story of how the building
happened to be put in that particular place. The
townspeople had been having a great dispute as to
where it should stand, and they couldn t arrive at any
agreement. So they had to get three disinterested men
to come from towns around to decide. It was winter,
and each man was lodged with a different family.
Well, the three men were to get together in the even
ing to talk over the matter ; and after supper, about the
time it got dark, one of em sent word to the others
where they were to meet by a colored girl that worked
in the house he was staying at. The night was stormy
snow and cold and a high wind and it was too
much for the girl. They found her next day dead in
a drift, and on the spot where she died the three men
decided the church should stand, and not a person
in town dissented."
At this point in my companion s discourse a young
woman came along and accosted him with, " Oh, father,
where do you think I ve been ? "
" I don t know. Where have you ? " said he.
" Over to Mr. Delancey s house* He invited me
in to see the paper he s put on the hall, and I told him
just what I thought. c I ain t stuck on it at all/ I said."
154 ^ ew England and its Neighbors
"This gentleman is interested in old times/ re
marked her father, indicating me.
" Are you ? " said she. " It s too bad old Lew
Dudley ain t alive. He knew more about old times
than all the rest of the town put together."
" I don t suppose he would have talked with a stran
ger, he was so cranky/ commented the father.
" He was a queer old codger," continued the young
woman, " and he got worse than ever in his later years
while he was living all by his lone; and what a man
he was for lawsuits ! He never could do business
without suing to get his rights. Then he was a great
hand for marrying. Gee ! it was astonishing the num
ber of wives he had, one after the other. Some died
and some got divorced. One of em died when I was
a little girl, and I remember they kept the body a week
or ten days* She looked so natural they weren t sure
but she was alive. The wife he had last didn t stay
with him only by spells. She was a city woman, and
she got lonesome here and had to go off to New York
every once in a while, to keep from perishing. They
had a regular cat and dog time of it anyway, and once
Old Lew came to our house with a paper he wanted
us to sign. I read it and it made out his wife was
crazy, and I said, * You bring a paper that says you re
both crazy, and I ll sign that quick/ Well, I must
be going."
When the daughter turned away, the man with the
A Jaunt on Long Island 155
rake pointed to a fine old colonial dwelling not far
away, high in front and low behind, with a great chim
ney. " That," said he, " is the house which inspired
c Home, Sweet Home/ It is the birthplace of John
Howard Payne."
1 looked at the structure more closely, later, and
found its air of repose and rustic simplicity quite in
accord with the sentiment of the famous verses ; but
a dwelling that interested me more was the " Dan
The ** Hume, Sweet Hi-nic "* House
Watkins House " on the town outskirts. It was
ancient and gray, with shingled sides and many odd
projections and angles. In the dooryard, amidst other
wreckage, was an old surf boat with a broken prow.
I ventured into the yard, and a bevy of geese sounded
the alarm. When I did not retreat thev came honk-
156 New England and its Neighbors
ing up to me, and the gander made a personal exami
nation, nosing me over, nibbling at my shoes, and
showing decided marks of disapproval. Behind the
house was a long garden enclosed by a shaky picket
fence. As I approached, a tattered old man rose from
his knees, where he had been carefully sowing with his
fingers a row of parsnips. He wore spectacles and
had a white, bushy beard.
"Them geese ain t very polite," said he. "They
got queer ideas o their importance, and kind o boss
this whole place. Sometimes I don t know whether I
keep the geese or they keep me. There s one thing
about em, though they re better n any watch-dog
I ever see. Can t nobody come around here but they
know it. Take it the middle o the night, it s just the
same. Everything ll be all quiet, and at the least lit
tle noise they ll speak right out as if they were awake
all the time. You know that old story about the geese
saving Rome from the enemy by giving warning. I
ain t a bit of doubt but what that was so."
Where the man was at work he had a line stretched
between two stakes to guide him in making his rows
straight. He had been putting in a variety of seeds,
and at the end of each little plot had set up a twig
with the seed envelope on top to indicate what
was planted there. He was doing a very neat job.
Through the middle of the garden ran a row of peren
nials rhubarb, sage, white raspberries, and currants.
A Jaunt on Long Island 157
" I have a good min to root out those currants/* the
old man remarked, "I m so dretful pestered with
the worms. I ve put on hellebore till I m tired, and
the worms get the best of me every year. I don t care
much for currants anyway. My white raspberries I
favor more, though I have to be everlastingly fightin
all the time to keep em from spreadin over every
thing. They furnish me all the berries I want myself,
and I let the neighbors pick em, too."
" I suppose your house is one of the oldest in town,"
said I.
cc Oh, law, no ! This is a new house. It was only
built one hundred and forty years ago. Easthampton s
got houses two hundred years old and over."
He had come out of the garden now and was getting
a drink at. his pump. This pump was close by the
back door, a venerable and clumsy affair made of
white ash logs which he affirmed had been bored and
put in three-quarters of a century before. cc I don t
want anything better n that pump and that water," he
continued, as he hung the tin cup back on its nail.
" They re talkin* about havin waterworks with pipes
run into every house, but I won t let *em come in
here."
a fj ave y OU a f arm ? " I inquired.
"No, I ain t a farmer. I m an old watchmaker;
but I do carpentering and other things, too ; and there
was a time when I pulled teeth and took daguerro-
158 New England and its Neighbors
types. You come into the house and I ll show you
where I work."
He conducted me first to a black little room, its
sides and ceiling lined with tools and pieces of wood
and iron of all kinds, the gatherings of generations.
Here he was accustomed to labor as a sort of Jack of
all trades, but paid special attention to making hickory
axe-helves, and could not mention machine-made helves
without snorting at their worthlessness.
" My watch business I do at the other end of the
house," said he, and led the way through several low,
wainscoted rooms. Finally we came to a door in a
room corner, and this door was so narrow, a person
inclined to stoutness would have found it impassable.
It looked as if it might give access to some secret pas
sage, but in reality it opened on a rough little entry
from which we stepped into the tiniest box of a shop
imaginable. The apartment was heated by a small
fireplace, and was furnished with benches and shelves,
a stool or two, and a miscellany of delicate tools,
watches, and pieces of clocks.
"When I was a young man," confided the old
watchmaker, " I was offered big wages and a place in a
large jewellery store ; but I don t want to be tied to any
one. Here I can work or not as I darn please, and it
suits me."
Among other things he showed an oddly decorated
gold-faced watch which he said had belonged to his
A Jaunt on Long Island
An Old-fashioned Sitting Room
uncle, the captain of a Sag Harbor whaling vessel.
His mention of the old port reminded me that it was
not far distant only seven miles and I determined
to see it. Accordingly, on the following morning, I
160 New England and its Neighbors
hired a buggy for conveyance and a boy to drive me
over. The road was the sandiest, rattiest, and dustiest
I have ever travelled, and I would have fancied it never
received any attention, had we not come across an old
Irishman laboriously digging out turf from the wayside
and heaving it into the wheel tracks. He adjusted the
turf as he went along into a hummocky causeway that
all teams scrupulously avoided.
Nearly our whole journey was through a desolation
of burnt woods. The oaks were all stark dead, but
the pines had withstood the fire better, probably
because there was less around their bases for the flames
to lick up. The fire had occurred the previous year,
and my driver had gone to it. He never wanted to
go to another. It used him up. The wind blew and
the fire leaped the roadways and went as fast as a man
could run. They had hard work saving the farm-houses
in and near the woods.
Some of the districts on the route had such names as
Hardscrabble and Snooksville and these names seemed
quite in keeping with the nature of the road. It was a
main highway, yet it was one of those privately-owned
mementos of the past a toll-road, and we had to
stop at a wayside cabin guarding a gate, and pay
seven cents for driving over its purgatory. The gate
was hung on a post opposite the door in the house
where the toll was collected. I noticed it was open
when we approached, and that there was no sign
A Jaunt on Long Island
161
of closing it after we had driven on. My idea had
been that toll-gates were ordinarily kept shut, and
only opened to allow travellers to pass after they had
paid toll.
"No," said my driver, "it s open all the time
except it might be when a tough customer comes
along that they think likely 11 kick up a row. It s
open all night, too, and if the toll-gate people have
gone to bed you just drive through without paying."
A Toll-gate on a Seven Cent Road
Presently we reached Sag Harbor, and my driver
turned back, while I started out for a ramble about
the town. The days of the whale fishery were Sag
Harbor s golden period. Since then it has never
1 62 New England and its Neighbors
amounted to much. Still, it appeared to me fairly
prosperous and its houses comfortable and well kept.
I only observed one relic of the old days that seemed
melancholy a stately mansion heavily shadowed by
trees. It was of the Greek temple style, with a lofty,
pillared front ; but its glory had long since departed,
and it was now dingy and out of repair, and had a
mildewed, ghostly look as if a blight was on it.
A short distance beyond, on the same street, a tall,
bony old man was working at a large buttonball tree
he had cut down. It had fallen across the highway and
the top reached the opposite curbing. As the man
chopped off the branches he trimmed the brush from
each in turn, and seemed quite oblivious to any need
of haste in opening the street to traffic. Some teams
turned around and sought another thoroughfare ; others
joggled up over the curbing and drove along on the
sidewalk. After a while a man approached with a load
of brick. He alighted and came to look at the debris.
The axeman was pecking away at the brush.
cc See here, Uncle Matthew," said the newcomer,
" why don t you cut off these top branches so teams
can go past ? "
" Wai, I m agoin tew."
" But you no need to trim all the brush first."
" Naow, look a* here, I m adewin* of this job, ain t
I ? If you re in a hurry, drive along on the sidewalk
same as other folks dew."
A Jaunt on Long Island 163
" But I got a ton and a half o brick on."
" That don t make no diPrence."
" It d smash my wagon all to flinders. I ll take
hold here and help, and you can make a road through
inside o five minutes."
The man began to pull some of the small limbs to
one side.
" Naow, yew jes stop that air/ 1 exclaimed Uncle
Matthew. " Yew re mixin every thin* all up. Yew
ac like yew was crazy."
The two were still disputing when I left, but Uncle
Matthew was having his way. I went down to the
harbor. A single long wharf reached out into its
tranquil waters, and there was no sign of its ever being
enlivened by much traffic. I wandered along the
shore with its drift deposits of seaweed and shells. At
one place two men were overhauling a net with the
intention of going out to drag it toward evening. At
another were several children playing in the sand and
half burying themselves in it. They had been wading
in the shallows and fishing with tackle improvised from
willow rods, string, and bent pins. One boy had
boasted he dared wade out farther than the others, and
he had tripped and ducked in all over. His jacket
was spread out to dry on the sand, and he was shiver
ing in the wind.
I had been disappointed in not finding the East-
hampton windmills at work, and when a Sag Harborite
164 New England and its Neighbors
acquaintance informed me that a mill at Bridgehamp-
ton was usually busy the year round, I departed in
search of it on the next train. Like most of the old
shore towns, Bridgehampton is a resort of the city
summer people to the loss of much of its rural charac
ter. However, two white churches of the old regime
remain, and, on the village borders, are farm-houses
not yet spoiled by modern quirks in architectural im
provement or distortion. Some of these outlying
houses were in themselves and all their surroundings
hardly changed from what was usual fifty years ago.
They have retained the big chimneys, and the small-
paned windows, the yards are enclosed by lichened
quarter-board or picket fences, and the hens are always
lingering close about the house and scratching holes
under the shrubbery.
An old dwelling of this sort has a small front yard
with a path running straight down the middle from the
front door to the gate, and it has a big side yard with
a narrow gate for pedestrians that is more or less dis
regarded, and a wide gate for wagons. In the workaday
larger yard is not a little of the paraphernalia of labor
in the form of machines and vehicles, especially those
whose best days are past, and there are piles of wood,
and very likely a few score chestnut fence posts with
holes cut in them for the insertion of rails. Conven
iently near the kitchen door is pretty sure to be a well
and a pump with a line of trough extending toward
the barn-yard.
MAKING FENCE POSTS
A Jaunt on Long Island 165
The old mill that I had come to seek I presently
found ; and though the arms were bare and the ma
chinery silent, I was encouraged to discover the door
open. I went in and sat down on some bags. It was
a dusty, cobwebby structure knitted stoutly together
with great beams and a multitude of braces and cross-
pieces. While I was looking about and accustoming
my eyes to the gloom, a man entered the door.
" Ah, ha ! now I ve ketched ye," he said ; but his
tones were not as alarming as his words, and I was
welcome.
He was just about to start the mill. The day had
been too quiet earlier, but the wind was now freshen
ing. A wide platform encircled the structure, and,
standing on that, the miller one by one unfurled the
canvas sails rolled up on the slatted arms and fastened
them in position. Then he let the arms free and they
began to revolve and started the millstones to grinding
the corn, while he went inside and stood fondling the
meal in his hand as it came sifting down the spout
from above.
The mill had four stories. In the second were the
hoppers ; the third was for storage, and the topmost,
a greasy place up in the revolving cap, was nearly
filled by the big wooden wheels, shafts, and brakes.
How its upper portions did creak and shake ! I could
appreciate the necessity for the strong sinews of heavy
and close-set timbers. Only one of the two pairs of
i66 New England and its Neighbors
millstones was employed to-day, for there was not
much grist ; but both were busy all through the winter,
& *
A Windmlller
and even then they failed to keep up with orders, and
the miller said he sometimes had three hundred bushels
A Jaunt on Long Island 167
ahead of him. The arms measured sixty-eight feet from
tip to tip, and were capable of developing energy to
the amount of forty horse-power. It takes a fair
breeze to set them in effective motion ; and yet, in a
gale, they will grind without sails.
I loitered for hours in and about the old mill, explor
ing the interior and watching from the fields the stately
revolutions of its white arms ; and I came away satisfied,
and left Long Island with the feeling that its ancient
windmills constitute one of the most picturesque
features in architecture to be found in all America.
Along Shore at Sag Harbor
VIII
LIFE ON A GREEN MOUNTAIN TOP
Tinkering the Road
WHATEVER
road you
travel in the
remote New England
town of Norton you
are in the woods. Oc
casionally you come
on a little farm in a
stony clearing, but the
diminutive fields are
soon passed and then
the interminable for
est closes in again. A
narrow-gauge railroad
touches the eastern
borders of the town,
yet it does not affect
the town life per
ceptibly, for it winds
through a deep valley
168
Life on a Green Mountain Top 169
a thousand feet below the level of the scattered homes,
and the highway that climbs up from the valley is a
zigzag of the steepest sort which the mountain folk
themselves avoid when they can. This road gullies
badly in rains, and now and then portions of the bank
on one side or the other slide down in the wheel-tracks,
bringing with them a clump of trees and bushes that
have to be cut away before the road is passable.
If you go westerly over the range on whose top lies
the town, you find another railroad and the large manu
facturing village of Milldale, but it is a long distance
thither, and the descent from the uplands is almost as
violently steep as that on the east To the north and
south the routes are gentler, but these only conduct
you to other little woodland towns situated, like Norton,
on the broad mountain summit ; and you toil over a
never-ending upheaval of hills by roads often precipi
tous and stony, and interrupted by countless thank-
you-marms.
Norton township contains no village. It has not
even a store. The post-office is in a farm-house, and
there are three mails a week. The butcher, the baker,
and the grocer make no rounds and most of the trad
ing is done at Milldale ; yet the hard journey to the
valley is undertaken so seldom that whoever drives
down is pretty sure to be intrusted with many errands
by the neighbors. The town hall at Norton is in the
heart of the woods, hemmed in on every side, and there
170 New England and its Neighbors
is no other building in sight. A mile farther on is the
church, on the borders of a very considerable open that
forms the domain of a lone farm-house just over a ridge
out of sight.
The town has two widely separated schoolhouses
the " White " and the " Holler." The former is on a
hilltop where four roads meet. For ten or fifteen years
the building has been painted brown, but previously it
had always been white, and the name has remained,
though the color has changed. It is snuggled in the
edge of a bushy wood, facing some ragged pastures
and cultivated fields. Close by is a neglected cemetery,
full of tottering and fallen stones, which nature is fast
enveloping in weeds and bushes, and down the hill are
two houses. From the height where the school build
ing is perched can be seen several other cleared patches
amid the forest and a number of homes " Martin s,
Jake s, Dan s, Elihu s," etc. The mountain people
do not use surnames, nor on ordinary occasions do they
have use for Mr., Mrs., or Miss. When a recent
teacher from a distance took charge of the " Holler "
schoolhouse, and, unwitting of the ways of the hill
folks, addressed certain of the girls who were as large,
if not as old, as she, with the prefix of Miss, they were
offended. It seemed to them she was putting on
airs.
The Holler schoolhouse is buried much more com
pletely in the woods than the White schoolhouse. The
Life on a Green Mountain Top
171
wild berry vines and the bushes have overgrown all the
space about except a narrow strip in front next the road.
At the Schoolhouse Door
Immediately beyond the highway is a swift, noisy little
river, and beyond that the forest again. The children
172 New England and its Neighbors
are very fond of the stream, and, during the barefoot
days of warm weather they are always wading and pad
dling about in it. The bottom is full of slippery stones,
and not infrequently a child will souse in all over and
have to go home to dry off.
The teacher sweeps out after school, and she comes
early enough in the morning to start the fire, though
it has sometimes happened, when she was later than
usual, that the boys have crawled in through a window
and started it. The windows are supposed to be fast
ened, but as the fastening consists of nails the teacher
sticks in above the sash, an entrance is easily forced.
The teacher boards a mile up the river, and the road
she traverses is for the whole distance through the
damp, cool woods with the crystal trout stream singing
along beside it. She has to carry her dinner, as do all
her scholars, for none of them live near enough to go
home at noon.
Norton s wealth, such as it is, depends almost entirely
on forest craft ; and the chief factor in determining the
worth of a farm is the character of its woodland. Spruce
is the most valuable timber, with fir, or " balsam " as
it is called, pine, and hemlock following after. Beech
and maple are plenty, but the price hardwood brings
scarcely repays the .expense of getting it out. As for
cord wood, large towns are too far distant to allow its
profitable marketing. Of the crops that can be grown,
potatoes seem best adapted to the mountain soil, but
Life on a Green Mountain Top 173
the ground is rough and inclined to bogginess. Worst
of all, it is full of stones, and though vast quantities are
carted off and dumped out of the way or made into
stone walls the plough every year brings up more.
Where a ledge is encountered, or a boulder too large
to move r cairns of loose stones are likely to be piled
around it, and among the debris grow clumps of bushes
and perhaps, a wild apple tree or two.
Few of the upland inhabitants seemed to be admirers
of their environment. In the words of one of them,
who declared he expressed the general opinion, "It s
a poor place, poor homes, poor everything, and the
people here now are only waiting for a decent chance to
sell out and get away."
But buyers are scarce, and it has to be a farm of
exceptional merits that will bring more than a thou
sand dollars with the house and barn thrown in. One
of the latest sales was of a place of two hundred and
fifty acres. Some good woodland was included, but
the buildings were practically worthless. It was sold
for taxes, which at the rate of two and one-fourth per
cent had accumulated until the whole amounted to sixty
dollars. When these had been deducted from the sum
realized, and a three hundred dollar mortgage had been
liquidated, only forty dollars remained.
In accord with the mountains most flourishing
industry, sawmills occur at intervals on every vigor
ous stream weatherworn, unpainted structures with
174 New England and its Neighbors
A Trout Stream
a great penstock bringing water from the dam above,
and round about them a chaos of logs, piles of boards,
slabs, sawdust, and rubbish. Sometimes this litter of
lumber does not keep to the mill site, but is strewn
along the road for half a mile.
Life on a Green Mountain Top 175
While I was in Norton a portable sawmill was set
up far back from the highway in the woods, and one
dull morning I paid it a visit. The mist enveloped
the uplands and made the forest vistas soft and
mysterious. It was the first of June, and in the wet
ravine were lady s-slippers coming into bloom, and
there were enough Jack-in- the-pulpits along the forest
path I followed to supply all the vernal congregations
for miles around. Where the woods had been cut off
were sometimes jungles of high-bush blackberries, or
thickets of wild cherry snowed over with blossoms ; but
the ordinary undergrowth was apt to be largely com
posed of hobble-bush, whose straggling branches, with
tfag.ii tendency to form loops by taking root, give the
bush its name and make it a great nuisance to the
lumbermen. It was still full of white flower clusters,
though these were past their prime.
In a mountain hollow, which a long-undisturbed
spruce wood kept in high-columned twilight, I found
the sawmill. It was a rude framework, with a broad
roof over the portion that contained the engine. Work
had just begun, and as yet only a small space right about
the mill had been cleared, but the whole tract would be
laid low and sawed during the summer. After the
lumbermen had finished, the land would be valueless,
unless some farmer would give a few dollars for it with
tfe idfca of burning the brush, and converting the de
nuded forest into pasturage. With the fine growth of
176 New England and its Neighbors
spmce still standing it was worth sixty or seventy dol
lars an acre, which was probably as much as any tract
in town would bring, and certainly exceeded by far the
worth of any cultivated farm land.
When I left the sawmill in the woods I took another
route than that by which I came, and presently walked
out into a rough pasture. There I met a barefoot little
girl going homeward, with her hands full of painted
trillium " pappooses," she called them. We went
on together, and after I had to some extent succeeded
in overcoming her shyness, she told me the names of
the flowers we saw along the way, among the rest
" swamp cheese," foam flower, white and blue violets,
and "shads," more familiar to me as cc shad-blows."
The first of the list was the azalea, as yet only in
bud.
I asked the little girl if she liked living in Norton,
and she replied she did ; but she knew very little about
other places. Once her father had taken her and her
brother to the circus in Milldale, and it was plain from
what she said that both the circus and the town itself had
seemed quite wonderful. The numerous houses, the
many streets, and the crowds of people, however, were
bewildering; and she was glad when they got home
after a long night drive up the mountain and through
the dark woods.
" Would you like a cud of gum ? " inquired the girl
at length, fumbling in her pocket and producing several
Life on a Green Mountain Top 177
brown lumps. cc I got it off a spruce tree near where I
picked the pappooses."
" Does every one call the gum they chew a cud ? " I
questioned.
cc No, some say a chaw, and some say a quid, but the
children at school mostly says a cud."
" What is that bird we hear singing now or whis
tling one low note and several high notes ? " I asked.
"A fiddler bird, the teacher calls it," was the re-
ponse. " Teacher says it says, c Here I come fiddling,
fiddling ; and the children at school they say it says,
c Rejoice and be glad/ and teacher says the robins say,
c Ephraim Gillet, the sky is skillet, scour it bright, scour
it clean. "
The fiddler bird, or white-throated sparrow, to which
we had been listening, visits most parts of New England
only in its spring and autumn migrations, but it is a
summer bird in the mountains, and I often heard its
ringing whistle. Some fancy it cries, " I, I, peabody,
peabody," whence comes still another of its names
peabody bird. None of our songsters has a call more
powerful and individual.
My companion informed me she had looked out
the back door early that morning, and a deer was
feeding in plain view on the edge of the woods. This
seemed a very natural incident when I saw the situa
tion of the house. It was a little brown dwelling, amid
some meagre, forest-girded fields, and was out of sight
178 New England and its Neighbors
of all travel, at the end of a grassy byway. The seclu
sion was complete. There were only three in the fam
ily, and I found the other two members the father
and a small boy loading a wagon with evergreen
boughs that had been piled about the base of the
house during the winter to keep out the cold.
I spoke with them, and after a short chat the man
suggested we should go indoors. Accordingly we
adjourned to the kitchen, where he spent an hour
entertaining me. The room was in much disorder.
There was litter and grime everywhere, and the
remains of the breakfast and the unwashed dishes
were still on the table, although it was nearly noon.
The ceiling was stained with leakage, and two or three
great patches of plastering had fallen, while the floor
was uneven, and so worn that the knots and nails
stood up in warty eminences all over it. Through an
open door at the rear of the kitchen I could see out into
a shed a gloomy apartment, hung about with gar
ments and rags, pieces of harness, tools, and accumu
lations of household wreckage. Under foot was a
scattering of stove wood, mostly tough and knotty
sticks, that looked as if they had escaped the fire
because they resisted splitting so strenuously. Horace
Stogy that was my host s name was not a very
forehanded farmer, and if he had sufficient stove wood
for immediate needs he took no anxious thought for
the morrow.
THE FIDDLER
Life on a Green Mountain Top 179
Mr. Stogy proved to be a musical enthusiast, and
soon produced a beloved "fiddle" to show me. It
was a really fine instrument, and he played it with
delicacy and feeling. He also possessed a piano
the only one in town. It stood next the kitchen sink,
with its legs protected from damage by newspapers
tied around them. Some of the strings were broken,
Mr. Stogy said, and he did not use it much anyway.
His wife, when she was alive, was quite a hand to play
on it, but he was no pianist himself, and only " played
chords," an accomplishment which I found was com
mon among the mountain folks in such houses as had
an organ in the sitting room. It consisted in fingering
a tune by ear and striking keys which were in har
mony with the air, though entirely independent of the
printed notes.
During the winter Mr. Stogy was in considerable
demand to furnish music at the dances. For his
services he received three or four dollars each time.
The participants in the dances were apt to be of the
ruder sort, and there was some drinking and roister
ing, and the parties did not break up until the gray
light of morning began to steal across the snowy
uplands. Serious-minded church members kept aloof
from this form of merrymaking ; " but I can tell you,"
was one person s comment, " if they was to go they d
hurt the dances a good deal more than the dances
would hurt them."
i8o New England and its Neighbors
Nearly all the homes I saw in Norton were in
many ways akin to Mr. Stogy s. There was very little
care about appearances. Few of them were painted,
and dilapidation was not by any means uncharacteristic
of the majority. The surroundings were unsightly,
and rubbish gathered where it would. Barns and
sheds were rarely substantial. Usually they were
loosely constructed, and had a tendency to totter into
early ruin. Some of the houses had the stagings on
the roofs that had been there ever since they were last
shingled, years before. This looked shiftless, though
I must confess the stagings might be convenient when
the time came to shingle again.
The only new house I observed was one started a
year or two previously that had come to a stop half
done ; but whether its owner desisted because he had
exhausted his energy or his credit, I did not learn.
The ground around was upheaved just as it had been
left when the cellar was dug. The roof was on and
the sheathing, but the building was not clapboarded,
and no lathing or plastering had been done inside.
Yet the family had moved in and had taken as a
boarder the teacher of the " White " schoolhouse that
is painted brown. A well-worn path led from the
dwelling down to a stream in the hollow, a few rods
distant, where there was a dipping-place, and thence
was brought the household supply of water. At most
homes spring-water flowed in pipes directly into the
Life on a Green Mountain Top
181
Grandpa gives the Boys some Good Advice
house, or at least to a tub in the yard, though other in
stances were not lacking where families carried the
water by hand from some natural source, very likely
quite a walk distant.
The interior aspect of the Norton houses I thought
better than the exterior, and the sitting room in par
ticular usually had touches of attraction and of homely
comfort. An odd feature of the older houses was a
cat-hole puncturing the wall low down at one side of
1 82 New England and its Neighbors
the kitchen door. A shingle suspended on a single
nail closed the hole to the weather, and swung back of
itself into place after a cat had- pushed it aside and
crept through. One house I visited had a second cat-
hole which gave access to the sitting room from the
kitchen ; but this was uncommon, and as a rule the cats
onJy had free run of the latter apartment.
Here and there on the Norton hilltops could be
found grass-grown mounds and excavations, accom
panied perhaps by the wreck of an old stone chimney,
showing where once had been a home ; yet enough
houses have been built to replace those that have gone.
The town has not decreased in population, as have
most rural towns in New England. It was settled late
barely a hundred years ago and it has never
passed the pioneer stage. It is still a backwoods town,
and continues, as in the past, largely dependent on its
forest industries. When the woodlands are exhausted,
as it seems probable they will be soon, grazing and
dairying may in some form be found profitable ; but it
is not unlikely that a considerable fraction of the inhab
itants will seek some more favored section. In that
event the forest will take to itself many of the now open
fields and pastures, effacing, so far as it can, the mem
ory of man with his devastating axe, and attempting to
restore the uplands to their former sylvan solitude.
Another possibility is that Norton will fare as has
the mountain town neighboring it to the south, where
Life on a Green Mountain Top 183
the old inhabitants have to a great extent sold their
places to foreigners from Milldale and gone away.
The " Polacks," Jews, French, " Eyetalians," etc., who
have moved in, attracted by the fact that they " can
buy a farm for little or nothing," are not a very desir
able class. They " live like pigs," and are often the
worse for liquor ; but they spend so little for their living
expenses that they are, comparatively speaking, pros
perous. Some of the run-down Yankees who remain
are more disreputable than the foreigners drinking,
swearing, worthless decadents, strangely shiftless and
irresponsible. I was told of one nondescript family
of this class that had recently sold a sleigh. Before
the buyer came for it they had a chance to sell again
and did so. In each case they got their pay, and when
man number two discovered the situation, he demanded
his money within twenty-four hours, or he would have
them arrested. That night the household packed up
their goods and wended their way to another state.
One finds among the mountain dwellers not a few
peculiar developments of individuality to which the
seclusion of the thinly settled upland adds its own
flavor. For instance, there was Dr. Podden. He
lived in a little house he had built for himself off on a
rough wood road, and he escaped taxes by refusing to
pay them unless the town opened up a highway to his
place. He was a forest hermit of whom the world saw
little. Gathering gum was his chief employment, but
184 New England and its Neighbors
he made some sort of a salve which he sold among the
neighbors, and this gave him the title of doctor. He
The Rain-water Barrel
was tall and dark, with a grizzly beard, and was reputed
to be "part Injun. 1
Life on a Green Mountain Top 185
Another man out of the common was Blind Crip-
ton. He boarded in a family with whom he had been
for many years, but he was not a dependant and made
his living by peddling. He could go about the home
town and several mountain towns adjoining, by him
self, and he always knew when he came to a house.
As he plodded along he tapped the ground before him
with a long cane, and he had a curious habit of touching
the knob of the cane to the end of his nose at frequent
intervals, as if this, in some occult fashion, helped him
to find his way. His hearing was remarkably acute,
and it was never safe to whisper in his presence expect
ing he would not catch what was said. He could even
tell to what family a child belonged by the sound of
its voice.
His wares were small articles like thread, needles,
pins, stockings, cough cures, candies, etc. He was a
man of serious thought and liked to talk about medi
cine and history and religion ; but his views on the last
topic were not very welcome in most homes, for he
was an aggressive and extreme non-believer. In his
wanderings Blind Cripton of course lodged and took
his meals at the farm-houses. He had a keen antipathy
to pork and would have naught to do with anything
that contained what he called "squeal-grease," and
though very partial to dandelion greens, yet if they
had been cooked with pork he would not partake. In
fact, he always carried along a supply of crackers in his
1 86 New England and its Neighbors
bag, and nibbled those if he was not suited with the
food at the places where he stopped.
A more pleasing type than either of these two men
was Mrs. Flanagan, one of the town s poor. She was
not wholly dependent and she still lived in her own
house a tiny gray dwelling down a steep hill from
the road, on the far side of a mowing field. As you
saw it from the highway it seemed lost among the vast
billowing hills of green forest that rose around. You
noticed, too, that the little group of buildings looked
strangely barren almost as if they were deserted.
Fifteen years ago Mrs. Flanagan s husband went out
to an apple tree behind the house and hung himself.
From that time on she and her daughter Martha car
ried on the farm. Then the daughter s health began
to fail. A cancer was eating her life away, and toward
the last she became a helpless invalid. Finally she
died, and the mother struggled on alone, often in dire
want, until the town officers, realizing that in her feeble
age she was not fitted to support herself, took her and
her farm in charge, and drove away her few cows.
They would have put her in some family to board,
but to such an arrangement she would not agree ; and
in a desultory way the officials care for her in the little
gray house. They furnish her cord-wood and she saws
it. When the supply fails, as has happened once or
twice, she goes to the woods and hacks off dead
branches and drags them home. The selectmen were
Life on a Green Mountain Top 187
intending to shingle the dwelling presently, and the
shingles were ready in the shed. Meanwhile the roof
leaked badly, and in heavy rains the water came down
as through a sieve. The lone inmate had even been
compelled to get up on stormy nights and move her
bed to escape the dripping from above.
She was a timid woman, and she suffered a good deal
from fright during the long nights after Martha died.
This fear has gradually subsided, but she always locks
up early and rarely burns a light. Her only constant
companions now are her three cats, and the favorite of
these is a yellow cat that she thinks resembles a wood-
chuck, and so is not a little worried lest some one should
make a mistake and shoot it.
The neighbors frequently visit her, for she is a
gentle old soul and they are fond of her. They bring
her good things to eat that her own cooking and lean
larder will not be likely to supply, and they bring her
flowers. She does not much care for the latter. Her
mind is of too practical a turn to take much pleasure
in what is merely pretty and in no way useful. It is a
far greater satisfaction to get reading matter. She is
especially interested in the local newspapers, and likes
to read all there is in them except the murders.
Before I left Norton, I, too, visited Mrs. Flanagan
and sat for a half-hour in her tiny kitchen. She apolo
gized because it was " so dirty," though in reality it
was very neat and clean. Yet it was not as it had been
1 88 New England and its* Neighbors
when Martha was alive. Then they kept everything
scoured <c as white as snow." It was a curious apartment
no plastering, no wall-paper, but sides and ceiling all
roughly sheathed with unpainted smoke-darkened
boards. There was a small stove, a table, a few chairs,
and on a shelf a great wooden clock. Mrs. Flanagan
herself sat in a rocking-chair tucked back in a corner.
She was frail and white-haired, and wore heavy-bowed,
old-fashioned spectacles.
From where she sat the road up the hill was
in plain sight. She never walked that far, but she
rarely failed to see every one who passed or who
turned into the lot on their way to make her a call.
The approach to the house was very " sideling," and
such of her visitors as come in a team usually tie the
horse to the bushes on the borders of the road. She
lives alone and probably she will die alone, and when
the neighbors intending to call get within sight of
the house they always watch to see if the smoke is
rising from the chimney. Some of them would turn
back if it were not, fearful that the little gray dwelling
in the hollow had at last lost its tenant.
One phase of life on this New England mountain
top was wholly new to me and unexpected illicit
distilling was carried on in Norton. Two or three
families in different sections of the town were men
tioned as engaged in the business, and it was said they
smuggled off their liquor at night concealed in loads
Life on a Green Mountain Top 189
of wood or hay to a town in the lowlands. I asked
one of the town residents what he knew personally of
this distilling, and he said: "Well, I ve seen little
streaks of smoke trickling up through the trees from
Scates s woods, and I ve been down through there and
found coals and ashes and lead pipe. Old man Scates
nearly died last year from drinking cider brandy he d
distilled through lead piping/
My informant was of the opinion that brandy was to
some extent illicitly manufactured in all cider regions.
If the country was not wooded and lonely enough to
afford good hiding for the plant, the liquor was pro
duced in a still set up in the house cellar ; and the dis
tillers responded to awkward inquiries by saying that
they boiled the swill down there.
I was in Norton over Sunday. It was a doubtful,
threatening day, a fit successor to a long spell of
showery, befogged days preceding. Shortly after break
fast I heard some one at the kitchen door talking
with my landlady. The conversation hd begun with
her remarking, "Well, Jim, what s the news this
morning ? " to which he had responded, " Nothing
much worth lyin about."
I looked out the window and saw a lank, long-haired
youth standing at the threshold. He was evidently
afflicted with a bad cold and my landlady made
some sympathetic reference to the fact. "Yes, Mrs.
Smithers," he said as he blew his nose violently, " and
190 New England and its Neighbors
it takes all my time to keep my ventilator open. I
wish you would pray the Lord for good weather."
" Hmph ! " responded Mrs. Smithers, " this
weather ain t any o the Lord s doin s. I m goin to
get a ladder and go up in the sky and whack the
devil in the head then we ll have a change, I
guess."
"Well, I must be trottin along," said the man.
" Most folks lay off on Sunday, but you know I m
away from home workin all the week jus now, and
Sunday s the only chance I get to tend to my garden."
"And do you expect things ll grow that you start
on Sunday ? "
" Why, cert ! Don t make no difference about the
day. You d ought to see my ineyuns that I planted
Sunday, two weeks ago finest-lookin ineyuns I ever
set eyes on."
" But what does your wife say ? "
" She don t say nothin , cause she knows it s heces-
sary so t she and the children ll have somethin to live
on. I tell you gettin married knocked a lot o money
out n me. Before I was married I didn t have to work
but half the time, and had money in my pocket, and
could dress right up to the handle. Now I have to
work all the time, and can t keep out o debt and
jus look at my clo es ! "
With that he shambled away, blowing his nose as he
went.
TAKING CARE OF THE BABY
Life on a Green Mountain Top 191
Later in the morning the warm sunshine glinted
through the clouds, and I decided to attend church.
The way thither was along a shadowed valley road
delightful with damp, woodsy odors and the mellow
rustle of a near-by stream hurrying over the stones that
strewed its channel. I found Deacon Tanner standing
on the meeting-house steps a labor-worn, elderly
man, who greeted me with hearty cordiality. He was
the chief pillar of the church, and contributed one
dollar weekly to its support.
I looked at my watch. Eleven o clock just ser
vice time. But the Deacon said, "There s no one
here yet," and we chatted at the door for a half-hour
before he suggested that we go inside. He told me
the story of the church. It had been erected largely
through his efforts. Thirty years ago the town was
churchless. " I was always a Baptist," he said, " and
there was one other Baptist family in the town at that
time, and several Universalists, and, what was worse, a
number of Spiritualists. When we began to think of
having a church, we held Sabbath services in the town
hall. That stirred up the Spiritualists, and sometimes
they d get into the town hall ahead of us, and they d
have a meeting and we wouldn t."
But it seemed that the Baptists had the most staying
power, and in the end, with outside assistance, they
put up a fifteen hundred dollar building, and started
off with a goodly attendance and a very fair list of
192 New England and its Neighbors
members. " I suppose that you would be satisfied
with just sprinkling/ remarked the Deacon in conclu
sion, eying me in the hope he was mistaken, " but
that wouldn t suit me at all/
The baptisms take place in a pool below a bridge
a half-mile distant. Whenever any baptizing is to be
done the banks in the vicinity are lined by a crowd
largely made up of those outside the fold, to whom
the ceremony presents a strange and entertaining spec
tacle. Some of the ungodly have been known to
improve the occasion by going up stream and cc kick
ing up a rile," but there is no serious disturbance.
The congregation at Norton church on the day I
attended numbered eleven. We had all walked, and,
judging from the weedy earth in the line of horse-
sheds, few ever came in teams. A preacher was lacking.
The last minister, by holding a service here in the
morning and at a village three or four miles away in
the afternoon, had earned seven dollars a week. All
went well until he became too insistent in his efforts to
heal the various antipathies that existed among the
members of his flock. He took sides, and tried to
bring about harmony by force. He even proclaimed
that he would expel a certain member from the church
unless he did as he ought; and a large congregation
gathered for several Sundays to witness the threatened
expulsion. But, instead, the minister left.
It was customary now for those who came to join in
Life on a Green Mountain Top
193
a Christian Endeavor service and then in a Sunday-
school. They formed a kind of family party as I saw
them. There was the Deacon, his wife, a son, two
daughters, one of them married and accompanied by
The Lonely Little Church
her husband and little girl, and a young man and his
sister, also related to the Deacon, but not so closely as
the others. The teacher of the "White" school-
house and I represented the outsiders.
The church interior was very simple a low plat
form and desk pulpit, a cabinet organ, two rows of
settees, a big stove, and, on the rear wall, a clock that
punctuated the quiet with ponderous ticking. One or
two patches of ceiling had fallen, and the plastering
was everywhere cracked into an irregular mosaic and
194 New England and its Neighbors
looked as if a slight shock would bring it all rattling
down. The Endeavor meeting was of the usual pattern,
with singing for its most prominent feature ; but there
was no lack of remarks, Bible readings, and prayers, and
every one took a part in these, with the exception of the
outsiders and the Deacon s little granddaughter. The
organ was played by the school-teacher, and all sang
with fervor, though each quite independent of the rest
as to time and harmony.
With the beginning of Sunday-school the Deacon
went to the platform, and put some questions in
connection with a gaudy-colored picture on a wall roll.
cc What is this, thar ? " he would inquire, and point with
his eye-glasses* reaching up on tiptoe, for the picture
hung high. The wall roll illustrated each lesson for
an interval of three months. They found it helpful,
and voted to buy another for the next quarter, at an
expense of seventy-five cents, after being assured by
the treasurer that while not enough money was then
in the treasury, there probably would be by the time
they had to pay for the roll. For detailed con
sideration of the day s lesson we divided into -two
classes. The Deacon s son had charge of one, and
the unmarried daughter of the other. The latter s
charge consisted of the granddaughter, who preserved
a discreet silence on most of the questions propounded,
so that the teacher had to answer them herself. In the
larger class we went faithfully through the mechanics of
Life on a Green Mountain Top 195
the lesson as printed in the lesson quarterlies, and then,
duty done, the Sunday-school united in a closing song.
Now that the religious exercises of the day were
concluded, the congregation left the meeting-house,
and loitered homeward, conversing on wholly secular
subjects, as if the church services had not been.
I had found it all very interesting, and could not but
respect those who had built the little church, and were
keeping it alive. With the Deacon, to be sure, his
particular form of religion was his hobby and chief
pleasure, but at the same time there was something
fine in his persistent labor and sacrifice for it ; and,
lacking his support, it seems quite probable that this
Green Mountain top would again become churchless.
A Home-made Lumber Wagon
IX
DOWN IN MAINE
I
HAVE always thought
that fiction made the
people of the New
England country much more
picturesque and entertaining
than they really were, for it
has seemed to me that in
New England., as elsewhere,
the commonplace abounded
and distinct originality only
cropped out at infrequent in
tervals. Since going "down "
in Maine I have revised this
opinion somewhat, and am
willing to concede more than
I would have before to our
dialect writers at least to
such as are not carried away
with a craze for queer types
and mere grotesqueness.
The rural population along the Maine coast is com
posed almost wholly of Yankees of the purest strain,
196
A Mount Desert Well
Down in Maine 197
than whom there does not exist a more piquant com
bination of shrewdness and originality, intermixed with
not a little downright oddity and crankiness. They
are born jokers, and their conversation is enlivened
with many curious twists and turns and out-of-the-way
notions. The talk of the men and boys, it must be
allowed, is apt to be well seasoned with brimstone, yet
this insinuates itself in such a gentle, casual way that it
is robbed of half its significance. On ordinary occasions
the inclination is to avoid absolute swearing, and make
the word " darn " in its various conjugations serve to
give the desired emphasis. " Darn " was one of the
hardest-worked words I heard, though a close second
was found in the mention of his Satanic Majesty.
Another characteristic of the Maine folk was their
great fondness for whittling. Some of them would
pare away with their jack-knives at sticks big enough
for firewood, and at one sitting whittle them all to
pieces. Yet this jack-knife labor was strangely aimless.
These down-east Yankees only whittled out their
thoughts rarely anything else not even a tooth
pick, though I did see one man, on the porch of a
store, fashion a prod about a foot long with which he
proceeded to clean out his ears.
Still another characteristic of the inhabitants was their
serene lack of haste. " Forced-to-go never gits far,"
was a sentiment that seemed to have found universal
acceptance in the rustic fishing village where I sojourned.
198 New England and its Neighbors
The people were all loiterers on the slightest excuse.
You saw them visiting in the fields, they sat on fences
together and in the grass by the roadside, and on the
counters and among the boxes of the little stores, and
on the piazzas in front of the taverns and post-offices.
Teams that met on the road often drew up to give the
drivers opportunity to talk, or a man driving would
meet a man walking, and both would stop, while the
latter adjusted one foot comfortably on a wheel-hub
and entered into conversation.
Yet the people were nqt incompetent or thriftless.
In their plodding way they nearly all made a decent
living, and some accumulated modest wealth. The
homes were, almost without exception, plain two-story
buildings of wood with clapboarded sides. The low,
old-fashioned, weatherworn houses, shingled all over,
walls as well as roofs, were getting rare. Barns were
small, for it is not a good farming region, and the
houses presented a somewhat forlorn and barren aspect
from lack of the great elms, maples, and spreading
apple trees which in other parts of New England are
an almost certain accompaniment of country -homes.
These trees do not flourish in northeastern Maine.
Instead, spruce and fir are the typical trees of the
landscape. Their dark forests overspread a very
large part of the country and give to it a look of rude
northern sterility, bespeaking short summers and long,
cold winters.
Down in Maine
199
A Lobster-pot
To me the region was most attractive close along the
shore. I liked to linger on the odorous wharves, with
their barnacled piles and their litter of boards and barrels,
ropes and lobster-pots. I liked still better to follow
the water-line out to the points where were seaward-
jutting ledges against which the waves were ceaselessly
crashing and foaming. Behind the points the sea
reached inland in many a broad bay and quiet cove,
and with every receding tide these invading waters
shrunk and left exposed wide acres of mud-flats where
barefoot boys grubbed with short-handled forks for
clams. Then there were the frequent ruins of old
vessels, some of them with hulls nearly complete, but
dismantled of everything that could be ripped off and
aoo New England and its Neighbors
taken away; others with little left save their gaunt,
black ribs sticking up out of the sand like the bones of
ancient leviathans of the deep.
" TwaVt storms that spiled em leastways that
wa n t the trouble with most on em," explained a man
I had questioned about them. " They just waVt sea
worthy no longer, you know."
The man was fastening a new sail to the bowsprit of
his clumsy fishing sloop that lay on its side on the
beach. " But you see that vessel, right over thar in
the middle o the cove that s a wrack. It drove in
here in a storm with nobody on board. That was a
East Injiaman wunst. There ain t many vessels of
any size owned along the coast here now. This boat s
the sort we have mostly hereabouts these days. I go
lobsterin* in it. I got one hundred and twenty pots
out, and 1*11 be startin to visit em about three o clock
to-morrer mornin . It ll be noon by the time I c n
make the rounds and git back."
I left the man tinkering his boat and went up from
the shore into a pasture field. There I found two chil
dren, a boy and a girl, picking wild strawberries. The
berries were small, but they were sweet and had a deli
cate herby flavor never attained by cultivated varieties.
The boy said they intended to sell what they picked
to the hotels. The hotels were good customers all
through the season, and the children tramped over
many miles of field and swamp and woods in a search
Down in Maine
20 1
for the succession of berries from the strawberries,,
which ripened in June., and the raspberries, blackberries,
and blueberries and huckleberries which followed later,
to cranberries in the early autumn.
Now a man called to the little girl from a neighboring
patch of cultivated land where he was hoeing. " Susy,"
A Home on the Shore
he said, " I want you to go home V get my terbacker.
It s right in my other pants* t I hung up by the suller
door."
" Do you want your knife, too ? " the girl called
back.
" No, jest the terbacker. I can t work good ithout
it."
"Your beans are looking well," said I, from over
the fence.
2O2 New England and its Neighbors
" Yes ; but the darned weeds grow so I have to hoe
em/ he complained, with the air of thinking the
weeds increased in number and size out of pure con
trariness.
cc You re a stranger round here, ain t ye ? " he con-
tinued, inquiringly.
I acknowledged that I was.
" Well, d ye ever see that stun over t Green
Harbor?"
No ; I had not.
" Well, ye ought to. It s a grave-stun marble
*n *t was jes like any other stun when twas
planted. Man named Ruckle is buried thar. I c n
remember him when I was a boy. He was a great
hand for religion use to be alus tellin how now
he bore the cross, but sometime he d weir, the
crown.
<c An people use to say to him he mustn t be too
sure. Might be he d go to hell after all. But, no, he
knowed he was goin* to heaven, n if there was any
way o informin his friends he was wearin the crown
after he died he d let em know. Well, he died n
they buried him n put up the stun, n bout three
months after ards people begun to notice there was
somethin comin* out on t. It was special plain after
rains, n then they made out twas a figger of a man
with his hands folded, prayin ; and there was a crown
on his head. It d pay you to go over thar n see that
SUMMER CALM
Down in Maine 203
thar stun. You arsk for Job Ruckle, He s a relative
V he ll tell you all about it."
My curiosity was aroused, and a few days later I
went over to Green Harbor and looked up Mr. Job
Ruckle. He was standing in his kitchen doorway.
" It isn t going to storm, is it ? " I remarked.
Mr. Ruckle cast his eyes skyward. "Well, I do
know," was his response, "we been havin awful funny
weather here lately. Now to-day you can t tell what
it s goin to do. There s spells when the sun almost
shines, and then it comes on dark and foggy n you
hear the big bell dingin down at the lighthouse."
His friendly communicativeness, like that of most
of the natives, was delightful. I mentioned the mysti
cal gravestone and he said: "I ll take ye right to the
buryin -groun n show it to ye. But I got to draw
a bucket o water fust. My woman d give me Hail
Columby if I didn t."
He picked up a heavy wooden pail, and I followed
him across the yard to an antiquated well-sweep. He
lowered and filled the pail.
" The well ain t so very deep, but you won t find no
better water nowhar," he declared.
I begged to try it and commended its sweetness and
coolness.
" Yes, the rusticators all take to that water," was his
pleased comment.
By rusticators he meant the summer boarders of the
204 New England and its Neighbors
region. That was the common term for them on the
Maine coast. At first my unfamiliar ears failed to
catch the signification of the word, and I had the fancy
that a rusticator was some curious sea creature akin to
an alligator.
" These ere rusticators," the man went on, cc stop
here time V agin to git a drink from my well.
That s ginoowine water, that is ! "
Presently he was leading the way down one of the
narrow, woodsy lanes that abound in the district to
the rustic burial-place of the community.
"Thar s the stun/ 1 said Mr. Ruckle, "V thar s
the figger coverin the hull back on t. Here s the
head V the two eyes, V out this side is the hands
clasped, n thar s the crown. Looks like an old
Injun, I tell em. There s lots o* people come here
to see it some on em way from Philadelphia, V
I ve seen this lane all full o rusticators buckboards.
Some think the figger s a rael sign from heaven ; but
my idee is that the marble s poor, or thar wouldn t
no stain a come out that way. I tell the relations t
I d take the stun down n put up a good one, but
the rest on em won t have it teched."
The story of the stone was interesting and the
cloudy markings on its back curious, and I could
make out the vague figure crowned and prayerful,
yet it certainly was too grewsomely like an "old
Injun " to be suggestive of a heavenly origin.
Down in Maine 205
One thing that impressed me during my stay in
Maine was the astonishing number of little churches
among the scattered homes. I could not see the need
for half of them. The only excuse offered for their
superabundance was the uncompromising denomina-
tionalism of the inhabitants. One man told me of
a little hamlet where two churches had recently been
begun a Methodist and a Baptist.
"They re at Clamville, way up t the end o Hog
Bay," he explained, with the customary attention to
details. " Tain t nothin of a place only bout
six houses there and the people are poorer n Job s
turkey ; but somethin stirred em up lately, and
they set to work to put up them two churches.
Well, their money s given out now, and they ve
stopped on both of em. I wouldn t wonder a mite
if they stood there jes s they air, half finished, till
they rotted and tumbled to pieces."
It was a man named Smith who related this. He
was driving and had overtaken me walking on the
road, and as he was alone he had offered me the
vacant seat in his buggy. That is a way the Maine
folks have, for a team not already filled never passes
a pedestrian, whether acquaintance or stranger, without
this friendly tender of assistance.
" You look like a feller I knew once that was to
our Smith reunion, over in Washington County a few
years ago," the man confided. "But he was rather
2o6 New England and its Neighbors
taller n you, come to think. I was livin over there
then and I got up the reunion myself. We had a
great time. There was Smiths from all around
Massachusetts and everywhere forty or fifty of
em ; and there was a friend of mine there, an artist
from Aroostook County with his camera. He took
two pictures of the crowd, and he had bad luck with
both of em. I looked through his machine and it
was the prettiest sight ever I see all of us settin
there on the grass with the woods behind. By
George, I wouldn t a had them pictures fail for
twenty-five dollars !
"You re stoppin over here at Sou East Cove, I
s pose. You at one o the hotels ? "
"Yes, at Bundy s."
"Well, that s a good place best there is there.
I ll set you right down at the door. Bundy s wife s
a good cook, and they ain t too highfalutin on prices.
Only trouble is Bundy gets full."
"What, in Maine?"
" Oh, yes, no trouble about that. You c n always
get your liquor in packages from the cities, and there s
always drinkin resorts in every town that has drinkers
enough to support em. In Bar Harbor and such
places they run the saloons perfectly open, but mostly
they are a little private about em. You have to go
downstairs and along a passage or something of that
sort. It s understood that about once a year the
Down in Maine 207
drinkin places ll be raided, and every rumseller pays
a fine of one hundred and fifty dollars. System
amounts to low license to my thinking and I don t
see but there s full as many drunkards in Maine as
you ll find anywhere else among the same sort of
people.
" I ll tell you of a case. I live back here a mile
or so beyond where I picked you up, and down a
side road near the shore there s a man and wife lives,
and the man gets tight about once in so often. He s
uglier n sin when he s spreein beats his wife V all
that sort o thing. Well, up she come the other
night through the woods carryin a little hairy dog
in her arms. Her man had been and got crazy
drunk and took to throwin things at her, and her
face was cut and bleeding. She was highstericky
bad, and talkin wild like, and huggin that little dog
o hern and tellin it to kiss her only comfort she
had in the world, she said. I was for gettin the
man arrested, but she wouldn t hear of it.
" Hohum, wal, wal, it ain t easy to know what to
do about this drinkin business, and our Maine system
don t work to perfection no more n any other. Guess
it s goin to rain."
It did rain that evening came down in floods
with an accompaniment of lightning and thunder.
After supper I sat on the piazza with the rest of the
hotel family. Among the others gathered there was
208 New England and its Neighbors
a young woman from one of the neighbor s, and a travel
ling agent who said he had made fifteen hundred dol
lars in nine weeks, and a piano-tuner from * a seaport
a score of miles distant, who said he had made thirty-
four dollars in the last three days. " But I ain t col
lected a red cent of it," he added, " and how in the
old Harry m I goin to pay my hotel bill with things
goin on that way I d like to know ! "
Slap ! The piano-tuner despatched a mosquito.
cc Dick," said he, addressing the landlord, " where d
all these mosquitoes come from down around here ? "
" Well," responded the landlord, soberly, " we
bought quite a few last year. Had em barrelled up
and sent on from Boston."
" Dick, d you know," said the travelling agent, " I
like to a got killed when I come off the steamer
on to your wharf this trip ? "
"No; how s that?"
" My gosh, I had the greatest highst t I ever had
in my life ! Stepped on a banana peel or some
thing, and my feet went out on the horizontal so
almighty quick I forgot to flop. I couldn t a sat
down any harder if I d a weighed five ton ! "
Then the others related various " highsts " they
had experienced, after which the piano-tuner changed
the subject by remarking: "Too bad you didn t git
your hay in, Dick. J d V helped you if you d spoken
to me about it."
Down in Maine 209
The hay alluded to was a bedraggled little heap in
front of the hotel steps that had been mowed off a
a patch about two yards square.
"Yes, that grass is wetter n blazes, now. I cut it
with my scythe this mornin , and I been calculatin*
to put it on my wheelbarrer n run it into the barn,
but I didn t git round to it. This s quite a shower
and it s rainin hot water that s what it s doin !
But it ll be all right to-morrer. These evenin*
thunder-storms never last overnight. You take it
when they come in the mornin , though, and you ll
have it kind o drizzly all day."
cc Dick," said the tuner, " what s the matter you
don t git the rusticators here the way they do at Cod-
port ? This is a prettier place twice over."
c <The trouble," replied Dick, "is with the Green
Harbor end o the town. We got all the natural attrac
tions this end, and there ain t no chance o the rustica
tors quarterin over there* t Green Harbor, and the Green
Harborers know it. So the whole caboodle of em
turns out town meetin days and votes down every
blame projec we git up for improvin o the place.
Only thing we ever got through was these ere slatted-
board walks laid along the sides o the roads, but
they re gittin rotted out in a good many spots now.
What we want is asphalt."
" But the rusticators like scenery," commented the
piano-tuner. " Perhaps your scenery d draw em if
2io New England and its Neighbors
you only fixed it up a little. I ve heard tell that they
whitewash their mountains in some places so t they
look snow-capped. Why don t you whitewash your
mountains up back here ? You d have all the people
in Boston comin up to look at em."
An Old Schoolroom
Mr. Bundy ignored the suggestion of whitewash.
His mind still dwelt on the wrongs of his end of the
town. "We can t even git a new schoolhouse," he
declared. " Same old shebang here we had when I
was a boy, and same old box desks. They re most
whittled to pieces now, and the roof leaks like furia-
tion. You d find the floor all in a sozzle if you was
to go in there to-night."
THE POST-OFFICE PIAZZA
Down in Maine 211
"That s your district school, ain t it?" questioned
the travelling agent. " But you got a good high
school ? "
"Yes, the buildings good enough, but the school
only keeps here one term. Then it goes down t the
Point a term and then over t Green Harbor a term."
" What do the children do ; foller it around ? "
" No ; it s four miles between places, and that s too
fur."
" Nearly all the boys in town seem to have bicycles,"
I said. " I should think they might go on those."
" That s so, there is a considerable number of
bicycles owned round here," acknowledged Mr.
Bundy. " D you ever notice though, t a boy c n
go almost any distance on his bicycle for pleasure, but
as Pr usin it f r accomplishin anythin , he might s
well not have any ? "
" Well, I ve got to go home," interrupted the
young woman from the neighbor s.
" What s your rush ? " a young fellow sitting next
her inquired. " Thought I was keepin company with
you. We no need to be stirrin before midnight
tain t perlite."
" Midnight ! what you talkin about ? " scoffed the
landlord. " When I used to go to see my girl we set
up till half-past six in the mornin* set up till break
fast was ready."
" Well, I can t wait no longer," reiterated the girl.
2,12, New England and its Neighbors
" Hold on/ said the young fellow. " I ll borry a
lantern and go along with you/
" Tain t far, I don t want ye to," was the response.
" You git over across the street there alone and the
thunder ll strike you ! " the piano-tuner remarked.
But she had gone, and he turned to the young fel
low : cc Well, I m blessed if you didn t make a muddle
of it. Course she wouldn t go home with you. Who d
go home with a lantern ! "
For a time the company lapsed into silence and
meditated. Then some one spoke of a schooner which
had comQ into the bay and anchored the day before,
and went on to say that it had eight or ten young fel
lows on board from New York. " They re sailin the
boat themselves except for a cap n and a darky cook,
and they re givin shows along the coast. They give
one over t the Point last night."
" What was it like ? " inquired Mr. Bundy.
cc Well, twas kind of a mixture, but minstrels much
as anything."
"There s a good deal goin on around here just
now," commented the landlord. "To-morrer night
there s a dance over t Green Harbor, and night after
that there s a dance here."
" Isn t it pretty hot weather for dancing ? " I asked.
" Yes, I ll warrant there ll be some sweatin ; but we
don t mind that. We dance in spells all the year,
though we ain t had any dances lately, since winter."
Down in Maine 213
" How much is the admission ? "
" Ladies are free. The men pays fifty cents each,
or fifteen cents if they come in to look on and not to
dance. But you wait till next week. We re goin* to
have a regular town show then. You ve seen the
posters, I s pose. There s one in the office, and
they re all around the town on fences and trees and
barn doors, and I do know what not. The fellers t
put em up said they plastered one on to the back of
every girl they met. Course that s talk, but I know
they pasted some on to Bill Esty s meat cart."
"Yes," said the piano-tuner, "and they got one
on to Cap n Totwick s private kerridge, too."
cc Private darnation ! " responded Mr. Bundy. " The
only private kerridge Cap n Totwick s got s that ram
shackle old wagon he peddles fish in."
" I met the cap n when I come Monday," the piano-
tuner went on. cc I was standin out in front o the
post-office readin a letter when he drove up from his
house just startin out on a trip, and he stopped and
told me he d forgot to take his horse s tail out o* the
britchin when he was harnessing and if I d switch it
out for him t would save him gittin out. I see the
bill pasted on his wagon then, and to pay for my horse
tail job I made him wait while I read it through."
" Say, you wouldn t think it to look at him," said
the landlord, "but Cap n Totwick s got a good lot
o money salted down."
214 New England and its Neighbors
" He dresses like an old scarecrow/ responded the
piano-tuner, " and five dollars d be a big price for that
hoss he drives."
" Well/* said Mr. Bundy, " I was at the post-office
one day and the cap n come in just as I was sayin
I wanted to git a sixty dollar check cashed., and he
reached down into his old overhalls for his pocket-book,
and cashed the check yes, sir ! "
Thus the talk rambled on from one topic to another
through the long evening. I can only suggest in what
I have related its racy interest and the graphic glimpses
it afforded of the life and thought of the region ; and
when I think it over I am glad I avoided the famous
resorts and big hotels in my trip and took up lodgings
in that humble hostelry at Sou East Cove.
A Moonlit Evening
X
ALONG THE JUNIATA
FIFTY years ago
that idyllic lit
tle song, " The
Blue Juniata," was
known by every one.
It is very simple, and
yet the sentiment of
the words and the
gay, easily caught har
mony of the music
pleased the public
fancy, and it was not
only universally sung,
but parents named
their children after
the heroine, and boat-
owners adopted the
The Home Porch name for their boats.
The song is not now as widely and ardently beloved
as formerly, though it still charms, and it is to be
215
New England and its Neighbors
found in the popular collections. The first verse
is
" Wild roved an Indian girl,
Bright Alfarata,
Where sweep the waters
Of the blue Juniata.
Swift as an antelope
Thro the forest going,
Loose were her jetty locks
In wavy tresses flowing."
"What always impressed me most In this and the
other three verses of the song was the river. Its
beauty, I thought, must be superlative the blue
Juniata and the sweep of the waters how delightful !
The rhythm of the river s name, too, made a strong
appeal to my imagination, and it was these things more
than anything else that impelled me to visit the stream
toward the close of a recent summer. I did not get
acquainted with its upper course, but kept to the hilly
country through which it flows for many miles before
it empties into the Susquehanna. On either side are
frequent wooded ridges extending away at right angles,
with pleasant farming vales between. Numerous little
towns are scattered along the banks, each with a cov
ered wooden bridge reaching across the stream. The
river is too small and shallow to be used for traffic,
and it is never enlivened by anything larger than row-
boats. It has hardly the rollicking character suggested
Along the Juniata 217
by the song which has made it famous, and yet its only
serious fault, as I saw it, was its color.
cc No, it ain t blue just now," said a farmer, on whose
piazza I had taken refuge to escape a shower, " but
it is usually. This year, though, we ve been having
rains constant, and the river s been muddy all summer.
There ain t been a single time when we could go
" Gigging ! What is that ? " I asked.
" Ain t you ever gigged ? "
I confessed that I had not.
" Well, gigging is going out in a boat at night with
a lantern and a spear after fish. Sometimes we get fish
that long" placing his hands about two feet apart
" carp, you know."
From where we were sitting we looked across a
grassy yard enclosed by a picket fence. The fence
was designed primarily to keep out the hens and
other farm animals, but it came very handy as a
hanging-place for pails and crocks and various house
hold odds and ends. The crocks were especially
conspicuous. Indeed they were to be found on
nearly all the farmyard fences throughout the region ;
for the people were accustomed to put their milk in
crocks instead of in pans. On this particular fence
there was quite a line of these crocks squat, heavy
earthen jars that would each hold about four quarts.
In color they were light brown, excepting one of a
21 8 New England and its Neighbors
deep brick tint, which the man said had been his
grandmother* s, and was, he supposed, more than a
hundred years old.
" This house is old, too," he added " anyways the
end toward the road is. It .is an old Indian house,
The Dooryard Fence
and that end is built of logs. There used to be loop
holes in it to shoot from, but the logs and everything
has been boarded over and hid from sight this long
time, inside and out. It seems as if Indians must have
been plenty here once. We re always ploughing up
their arrow-tips and tomahawks/*
The shower was nearly past, and the man stepped
out into the yard and picked several clusters of grapes
from a vine that trailed up a tall pear tree. " These re
Along the Juniata 219
right nice, now/ he remarked, as he handed me
some.
" Which do you get most of pears or grapes
from that tree ? " I inquired.
" Well, since the vine s growed over the whole tree
we often won t get more n half a bushel o the pears,
but you c n see we ll get a good lot o grapes this
year."
When the last lingering drops of the rain had fallen
I returned to the muddy road. A mile s tramping
along its sticky trail brought me to a railway station,
and I sat down to rest on a platform truck. Every
few minutes a freight train would go thundering past.
The valley is a great railroad thoroughfare; for the
stream has graded a pathway through the hills directly
toward the coal and iron regions of the western part of
the state. The trains were very long, and often con
tained from sixty to eighty cars. How the engines did
pant and sway from side to side as they shouldered
along, dragging their mighty burdens !
" I suppose the weight of that there train is almost
beyond computation," said a sunburned, middle-aged
man, who had sat down on the truck near me just as a
train of monstrous coal cars, all loaded to the brim,
clattered past.
This remark led to a conversation, and the man told
me he had a farm a few miles back from the river. It
was a little farm only fifteen acres and I judged
220 New England and its Neighbors
he did not depend entirely on it for a living. At any
rate he mentioned that the previous spring when the
floods had washed away nearly all the bridges in his
town he had taken the time to help for several weeks
rebuilding them. But his farm had suffered as a conse
quence. " I bought a sprayer for my trees/ he said,
" and I only got a chance to use it on one side of one
apple tree, and that tree is just loaded on the side I
sprayed and you kin hardly find another apple on the
place."
Speaking of the farms in the district as a whole, he
said that while some ran up to two and three hundred
acres or even larger, a hundred acres was considered a
fair-sized farm and there were more under that figure
than over. The tendency is for the farms to divide
into smaller ones. The majority of them are mort
gaged, and the farmers are just about able to meet their
interest charges and other expenses and hold their own.
" Yes, it takes some scratching to pay a mortgage,"
my companion declared. " You wunst get one and
it hangs on and hangs on and you re likely to be left
in the brush in the end/
It was his opinion that the local farmers had not
shared the prosperity of the country in recent years ;
and yet some of their troubles were of their own mak
ing. There was the way they went into life insurance,
for instance. I did not clearly understand the relation
of cause and effect in parts of what he had to say on
AFTER THE DAY S WORK
Along the Juniata 221
tnis subject. Life insurance was evidently a great bug
bear to him. He looked on it as the wildest kind of
speculation and may have got something of a different
nature mixed with his narrative.
" We have had people that was well fixed, and life
insurance has made em poor/ he affirmed. " There
was one man I know that went into it right strong, and
he kep makin until he had twenty-five thousand
dollars, and he was tellin a neighbor man about it ; and
this neighbor, he was a good old Christian man, and he
said, c Now stop, you ve got a good house and buildings
and a good farm and you ve got all that money.
You re the richest man in these parts. Now stop
where you are.
" But the man said he was goin to go in again and
double his twenty-five thousand and then he d stop.
So he insured some more and lost all he had, and last
week his farm was sold at auction for thirty-seven
hundred dollars.
" The insurance agents are always goin about among
us tryin to get us to insure, and I ll tell you jus how
mean and low and devilish they are ; and I m a man
of truth, mister, and you can depen on what I say.
They try to make you insure your relatives that are
gettin old. Now, I call that devilish. I intend to
live right, I m a member of the church and of the
Sunday-school, and I m a delegate to-day on my way
to a church meetin . Well, they been after me
222 New England and its Neighbors
to insure my parents ; but I don t want to harbor the
thought that I could make money by their dying.
There was one feller bothered me special. My father
was gettin feeble and he was a consumptive man, and
this agent was forever urgin me to insure my old
father for ten thousand dollars.
" I didn t like to be dragged into a thing I knew
the devil was in, but he kep* at me, till one day he
come when I had the toothache and neuralgia. I
thought my eyes was goin to bust out of my head ;
and I said, * I don t want to see you no more. If you
come here again unless you ve got the law to pro
tect you in your business I ll kill you or cripple
you for life. I d do it now, but you ve jus hit me on
the wrong day. I got the toothache and the neuralgia
so I ain t fit to do nothing/
" That s what I tol him, and he never dared show
himself there again.
" Some folks gets their insurance money by fraud.
I know a man that made out a certificate declarin a
certain person had died that hadn t. He is a man that
pretends he is a minister and signs c Rev. to his name,
but he is so ignorant he don t know enough hardly to
direct his poor little children aright.
" The Good Book says, c What a man sows that
he ll reap/ and it s true. Most of em that insure has
a pretty hard time. The payments have to be made
and that takes all that them who are insured kin earn,
Along the Juniata 223
and a good many times it eats up all their property.
Men that was well-to-do have got shaky and are about
halfway on each side o the fence. You can t tell when
they ll have to drop every thin .
"There s a case like that right next to me. My
neighbor, he got his mother-in-law insured. He was
a poor man, but he didn t think she d live long, and
he paid on and paid on until he about broke his neck.
I was talkin* with him only lately, and he was askin
me what he better do.
cc I tol* him, c Unless you stick to it you ll lose all
you ve put in/
" That didn t make him feel any better, and he
swore and called his mother-in-law a bad name, and
said every one died but the right one. Now, ain t
that devilish ? "
I had to acknowledge that the spectacle of this man
anxiously awaiting the demise of his mother-in-law was
not at all admirable, even supposing her character fur
nished mitigating circumstances. What further in
formation I might have gathered on the subject of
insurance I do not know, for my friend s train came
in just then and we parted company.
During my wanderings along the Juniata I went up
several of the side valleys, and found them uniformly
fertile and attractive. I wondered if my acquaintance
at the railroad station was not mistaken about the
prevalence of mortgages, but I was assured by others
224 New England and its Neighbors
that he was not. Certainly the broad, smooth fields,
and the numerous herds grazing on the aftermath in
the home lots, and the substantial houses and great
barns were suggestive of comfort and plenty. The
dwellings were in most cases wooden ; but brick and
stone were not infrequent. The home vicinity had
always a pastoral, domestic air. You were sure to see
cats aplenty, and a loitering dog or two ; hens and
chickens were everywhere, and it was not unlikely the
farm poultry would include ducks and turkeys ;
Typical Outbuildings
pigeons fluttered about the roofs of the whitewashed
outbuildings, a bevy of calves would be feeding in
a near field, and you could hear the pigs grunting in
the hog-sheds.
Wheat was the leading crop of the region, and most
barnyards at that season contained a towering stack of
Along the Juniata 225
straw, somewhat undermined by the gnawings of the
cattle. Indian corn was another heavy crop. The
grain raised was nearly all ground locally, and every
town had its grist-mill, usually a big stone structure in
a vernal hollow, with a placid mill-pond just above.
A Grist-mill
These mills were delightfully rustic, and they had a
pleasing air of age and repose. I liked, too, their
floury odor. There was something very sweet and
primal about it, as of a genuine fruit of the earth
not simply a tickler of the palate, but an essential sus-
tainer of human life. I approached one of the mills
and asked a young fellow who was smoking his pipe
in the doorway if they allowed visitors.
cc Depen s on what sort o umor the captain s in,"
said he, and turned and spoke to some one in the mill.
Q
226 New England and its Neighbors
The " umor of the captain/* or proprietor, proved
to be agreeable, and I spent half an hour looking
about the dusty, cobwebby old building, with its big
wheels and hoppers, and heaps of grain, and bags of
flour and meal.
I returned to the road presently and resumed my
walk, and a quarter of a mile farther on came to a
cider-mill that had just begun its autumn work. It
was a shaky little skeleton of a structure on the banks
of the creek, with a blacksmith s shanty adjoining ;
and the mill and shop together drew a crowd. A
bellows wheezed and a hammer clanked from the
dusky recesses of the shop ; a horse was being shod,
and its mate, still hitched to the heavy farm-wagon,
stood half asleep outside. A small engine puffed and
rattled within the mill, and a farmer at" one side was
shovelling a load of apples into the hopper. Other
loads were waiting their turn, each with . an empty
barrel or two on top. A group of children lingered
about looking on and eating apples which they selected
from the wagons, and a number of men were sitting or
standing here and there, visiting and chaffing and oc
casionally stepping up into the mill to take a drink
of cider from a tin cup that hung handy.
Most of the cider the farmers were then making was
to be boiled down for use in preparing a winters
supply of cider apple-sauce, or apple-butter, as it was
called. Apparently no family could do without this
Along the Juniata
227
culinary luxury, and I saw the process of manufacture
going on in many a back yard. It was important that
the cider should be boiled while it was perfectly sweet ;
and as soon as possible after it had been brought home,
a great copper kettle was set up in some convenient
spot ? filled with cider, and a fire built underneath. The
Making Apple-butter
rule was to boil the cider three-fourths away ; and if the
boiling was started early in the morning, it would be
completed by noon. The scene presented was quite
gypsylike, with the crackling flames, and the splutter
ing, bubbling pot, and the smoke and vapors, and the
sunbonneted women hovering about.
228 New England and its Neighbors
When the cider had been properly reduced, the
pared and sliced apples were added, and flavored
perhaps with cinnamon, or perhaps with allspice and
cloves. The boiling of the apple-sauce would very
probably continue into the evening. All through the
afternoon the women took turns in keeping the con
tents of the pot stirring, for which purpose they used
a wooden paddle with a very long handle inserted at a
right angle. It was a relief to every one concerned,
when the apple-butter had thickened and was pro
nounced done. Now it only needed to be taken up
with a dipper and put into casks or earthen crocks and
it was ready to be set away. Some households were
content with fifteen or twenty gallons, but others
thought they could not get along with less than a
"bar 1" foil.
Skirting the north bank of the Juniata was the
ditch of an old canal. In the bottom was more or
less stagnant water, but for the most part the hollow
was overgrown with grass and weeds. Conspicuous
among the latter were the sturdy, wide-branching jim-
son weeds, set full of round, spiny pods that were be
ginning to crack open and scatter their seeds. One
day I came across a man hacking at these jimsons
with his scythe. The sun was low in the west, and
he was about to desist. " There s a heap to cut yit,"
he said. " I ought to Y started the job earlier/
I was less interested at the moment in jimsons than
Along the Juniata 229
in finding lodging for the night, and I asked the man
where such shelter was to be had. He replied that I
might perhaps stay with him but he would have to
see his wife first Then, after mentioning that his
name was Werner, he led the way up a stony lane to
a tidy farm-house on a knoll well above the river. We
went into a shed kitchen at the rear of the dwelling,
where we found the farmer s wife and daughter busy
drying peaches in the stove oven. They agreed that
I could stay, and I sat down by the fire. The room
swarmed with flies and midges, but otherwise was not
unattractive.
Mrs. Werner from time to time stepped to an out
building for wood. The supply was nearly exhausted,
and some of the sticks she brought in were pretty poor
specimens. " Upon my word, I don t know what we
shall do if we don t get more wood soon," she re
marked to her daughter. " My, oh my, that there
cherry we re burnin now is awful ! "
They had no woodland on the farm, and hitherto
had depended on line trees, orchard trees that had
passed their usefulness, and other waste about the
place. But these resources had of late been practically
exhausted, and Mr- Werner was planning soon to row
up the river in partnership with a neighbor and collect
a lot of old railway ties that had been dumped down
the bank. They would fasten them together with
wire into a raft and tow them down.
New England and its Neighbors
I had not been long in the house before it began to
get dark, and the daughter lit a lamp. Through the
open door I
could hear the
cattle lowing in
the fields, some
calves were
running uneas
ily back and
forth in the or
chard anxious
to be fed, and
the hens and
chickens were
crowding to
gether on a pile
of rails just out
side the picket
fence that sur
rounded the
yard, peeping
comfortably
when things
were settling to
their wishes
and uttering
sharp notes of alarm and protest when matters were
otherwise.
Childhood Treasures
Along the Juniata 231
At length a boy of sixteen or seventeen appeared,
went to the pump on the borders of the barn-yard, and
labored at the handle until he had water enough in the
accompanying trough for the two mules and span of
horses that were kept on the place. Then he called
the dog and went after the cows. By the time he
returned, his mother had set the potatoes and beef fry
ing for supper. She now left her daughter to finish
while she took a pail and went to the barn to help
milk. All the farmers wives in the region milked.
tUsually the work was shared with the - men, but on
pome farms it fell to the women altogether. The girls
f learned to milk as a matter of course and were said to
enjoy it. The care of the garden was another task
with which the women had much to do. The men
ploughed or spaded the plot in the spring, but the
planting, hoeing, and gathering of produce was rele
gated to the wives. None of the field work was done
by the women ordinarily, and yet they were very apt
to help during haying and harvesting, in seasons when
hired men were scarce.
The milk of the Werner farm went to a creamery.
It was collected daily and the skim milk returned.
Just then the price paid was one and one-half cents a
quart, and it rarely went above two cents. As soon as
Mrs. Werner finished milking and had washed her
hands at a bench outside the door, she resumed supper
preparations, and we presently gathered at the table.
23 2 New England and its Neighbors
The clock struck eight while Mr. Werner was asking
the blessing. " It s later n it is usually at this time,"
said he, " but we been extra driven with work to-day.
Farm Market Wagons
Help yourself/ he added, making a little gesture
toward the food. "We ain t much for waitin on
folks."
After supper the women cleared the table, washed
the dishes and the milk-pails, and attended to the dry
ing peaches. The boy went off to another room to
study his algebra lesson for the next day at school.
Mr. Werner and I sat and talked. "We have to
work pretty hard," he said, " and we d ought to keep
a hired man, but we can t afford it. I ve had bad luck
this year. I lost a good young horse in the spring, and
then come July I lost most half of my young cattle.
The cattle was with other young stock from the neigh-
Along the Juniata 233
bors out on a mountain pasture. We paid the owner
of the land for the grazing privilege, and he was to look
after the cattle ; but he was careless and a good many
of J em got into a ravine between two ridges and couldn t
find their way out. There waVt no feed, and they e t
laurel. That poisoned em and they died. I ain t had
no such bad luck since the flood."
" The flood ! When was that ? " I inquired.
"In 1889," was the reply. "The Juniata ain t
naturally a deep stream. You could wade it almost
anywhere, though you might get your shirt collar wet
in some places. But when we had the big flood, you
couldn t a* touched bottom with a fifty-foot pole. It
rained for three days about the first of June, and the
last night o the rain it come down in slathers. We
could hear it leakin in the garret, and my wife, she
kind o thought we better get up and see to things.
I wish we had. When we looked out in the mornin
the river was way out o the banks, and the water was
beginnin to come into the lower side o the yard. It
was risin fast, and we stepped aroun lively. We got
some o the furniture upstairs, and I turned the stock
out toward the higher land. Come nine o clock we
couldn t stay no longer, and I had to lay boards from
the piazza for the women to walk on, and when I left,
last of all, I had to wade up to my waist.
" My cows was all saved, but my hogs didn t have
no more sense n to swim back to the pen, and they
234 New England and its Neighbors
was all drownded but one. The chickens was bound
to stay too. They got onto the manure heap in the
barn-yard and sailed away with it All my sheds and
most o* the fences floated ofF. The barn stood on a
little higher groun than the rest o the buildings, but it
was undermined and was left in such bad shape I had
to build a new one. The only thing that kep my
house from goin* was one o those big old chimneys
built right in the middle of it. Why, in that flood, if
we was settin where we are now, we d be way under
water. It come within three inches o the ceilin .
Everything on this floor was about ruined.
" The river was full of all sorts of things, and the
bridges was all swep away and the crops spoiled, and
it was terrible. It was that flood that did up our canal.
There was a canal-boat tied right about opposite our
house when the storm begun, and as the water riz they
kep shiftin* the boat until they got it away out back
of the house in the orchard where they hitched it to
the trees. The river was only out of its banks two or
three days, but the walls o the canal was broken in lots
o* places and other damage done to it, and the com
pany ju$t left it as it was. Yes, that was a right smart
of a flood."
At the conclusion of this narration Mr. Werner
conducted me to my room. All was oblivion after I
retired until about four in the morning, when I heard
the farmer calling to his son from the foot of the
Along the Juniata 235
stairs in slow cadence, cc Fred, Fred, Fred ! do you
hear me ? "
" Uh-h-h ! " grunted Fred, sleepily.
" Come awn ! "
A pause and no response.
" Fred, Fred, Fred ! do you hear me?"
Uh-h-h ! "
" Come awn ! Don t pull the covers over you ! "
Silence and a repetition of the above dialogue with
slight variations continued for fully five minutes.
Then the father went out to the barn and I dropped
off to sleep. So did Fred, no doubt, for a half-hour
later the parental voice resumed its appeal from the
foot of the stairs.
" Fred, Fred, Fred ! do you hear me ? "
"Uh-h-h!"
" Come awn ! " etc., as before.
At length the father a second time went out, but
stopped in the yard and added a few supplementary
calls. Still Fred slumbered, and presently in came his
father from the barn again. He was ominously silent,
and he did not stay below. I heard him ascend the
stairs with wrathful footfalls, enter Fred s room, and
haul the young man out of bed by main force. I won
dered whether he did this every day.
By breakfast time at half-past six all the barn work
was done, and the brimming pails of milk were stand
ing at the kitchen door waiting to be strained. Fred
236 New England and its Neighbors
came in a little late. He had been to the river with
his gun, hoping to shoot a duck.
" No, I didn t get nawthing," he said in response to
a question of his sister s, as he carried a basin of water
from the back-room pump to the bench outside.
Then he spit vigorously, washed his hands and face,
and spit again. Expectoration was the Alpha and
Omega of everything he did.
" No, I didn t get nawthing," he repeated when he
sat down at the table, " but I see a loon. I didn t
meddle with him, though."
"Why not?" I inquired.
" Well, I had some experience with one last year.
He was swimmin in the river, and the boys all got
out their guns and he had some fun with us. He d
dodge quicker n lightnin . By the time our shot got
to him, he d be out of sight and the ripples circlin
away from where he d dove. I had a rifle, and I thought
that would fetch him, sure, but I fired more n twenty
times and never hit him only once, and all I did then
was to snip off a few feathers."
Mr. Werner did not quite approve of Fred s hunt
ing. " We use to have great flocks of ducks fly up
and down this river," he said. " There d be twenty
or thirty or more in a flock. Now, we think it s a big
flock if we see half a dozen, and we don t have wood-
duck any more, but only fish-ducks that ain t good to
eat, and a little duck they call the butter-duck. It
ONE OF THE STREET PUMPS
Along the Juniata 237
don t make no difference, though. Every one s boun
to shoot, and they fire away more lead at the ducks,
tryin to hit em, than those they get are worth a
good deal."
Across the river from the Werners was a village
where I spent some time after I left the farm-house.
Like the other hamlets I saw in the valley, this village
had a look distinctly Teutonic and foreign. Its
narrow streets, its stubby, cut-back trees, its paved
walks and gutters, and general stiffness were reminis
cent of Holland, yet it lacked Dutch cleanliness, and
was tinged with an unthrifty decay and dilapidation.
Among the wooden houses crowding close along the
walks were many small stores and shops which earned
their proprietors a meagre living by serving the tribu
tary farming region. The farm buggies and buck-
boards, carryalls, market and lumber wagons came and
went, but were never numerous enough to greatly
enliven the place or to very much disturb its tranquil
repose, Hitching-places, invariably in the form of
wooden posts with iron rods connecting the tops,
were provided in front of or near by all the public
buildings and larger stores.
The walks were sometimes of boards, but oftener
were of brick or rough, irregular slabs of flagging.
At intervals on them were great wooden pumps that
each served a number of neighboring families. But
perhaps the most interesting feature of the town, and
238 - New England and its Neighbors
one calculated to help immensely the village gossip and
sociability, was the porch that projected from nearly
On a Village Sidewalk
every house front, and which rarely failed to have a
seat flanking the door on either side. These seats
On the Juniata
239
were permanent, each a short settee with room for two
persons. They looked very domestic, and were sug
gestive of much chatting of a placid sort, and of the
calmness and phlegmatic ease that seemed to charac
terize the people not only of the hamlet but of the
entire district*. This staidness of demeanor on the
part of the inhabitants and the gentle aspect presented
by nature were^ot at all what I had anticipated. In
deed, I found little either in the local life or in the
appearance of the river and the country bordering to
recall the wild romantic flavor of that favorite song of
a half-century ago, " The Blue Juniata/
The Juniata
XI
DWELLERS AMONG THE CATSKILLS
Old-fashioned Churning
SEPTEMBER
had arrived, and
the Catskill farm
ers were cutting their
corn., digging their po
tatoes, and getting in
their late millet. As
for the summer peo
ple, they had nearly all
returned to the cities,
and the heights and
valleys had taken on a
touch of loneliness, and
the hotels and vaca
tion cottages looked
dismally empty. The
chill of autumn was in
the air, but there had
been no frosts of any
severity. The fields
were still noisy with the drone of insects, and the
chestnut burs were as yet prickly green balls with no
240
Dwellers among the Catskills 241
hint of cracking, though the nuts within were mature
enough to be toothsome to the ever hungry small
boy. That the youngsters had begun to knock off
the burs from the lower branches, and pound them
open with stones, was plainly evidenced by the broken
twigs and other litter under the roadside trees.
My first long walk in the Catskills was up a half-wild
glen that wound back among the mountains from one
of the larger valleys for a distance of five or six miles.
Snyder Hollow, as this glen was called, was hemmed
narrowly in by wooded ridges, and sometimes the trees
crept down and took full possession of all save the tiny
ribbon of the highway. But more commonly the road
was bordered by diminutive meadow-levels and strips
of cultivated hillside, and there would be an occasional
small dwelling. Most of the houses were of weather
worn gray and had never been painted. Others, either
as a result of a streak of prosperity with which fortune
had favored their owners, or in response to the influence
of summer boarders, had been furbished up and en
larged. But however commendable their furbishing
in augmenting the general tidiness and comfort of the
homes, those that were unimproved had a picturesque
charm their more favored neighbors could not rival.
One such that attracted my attention particularly on
my way up the glen was a little red house perched on
a slope high above the road. In the depths of the
ravine below was a hurrying trout stream, and this
242. New England and its Neighbors
chanced to be spanned just there by a bridge. I con
cluded to sit down on the bridge to rest and see more
Digging Potatoes in a Weedy Field
of the little house up the hill. Across its front ex
tended a rude piazza with a board roof. The piazza
Dwellers among the Catskills 243
served as a shelter for the family tubs, and on the
floor near the tubs some tomatoes were spread to
ripen. A woman in a calico sunbonnet was the only
person I saw about the place. She came out from
the kitchen door and descended a steep path to the
barn, near the stream. Shortly afterward, as she was
returning with a pail in either hand, a buckboard
driven by a young man came along the road and
stopped.
fc Hello, Jane ! " the occupant of the buckboard
called out to the woman with the pails.
" Hello, Bill ! " she responded.
" How are you ? " he continued.
" First rate ; how s yourself? "
" Oh, jus so, so."
cc Ain t your sprained ankle gettin along ? "
" It s better, but it s purty weak yit. Any word
from Johnny ? "
" Yes, we had a letter day fore yisterday, and he ll
be here by noon to-day, if I ain t mistaken."
" Well, you tell him I m comin round to see him."
And the man drove on, while the woman toiled up the
hill with her two pails and entered the kitchen.
Halfway between the house and the barn was a tall
butternut tree with a grindstone, a sawhorse, and a
meagre woodpile under it. The woman presently
paid a visit to the woodpile and carried off an armful
of sticks for her fire.
244 New England and its Neighbors
Next she came forth with a basket, retraced her steps
to the tree, and picked up a peck or so of the butter
nuts. These she spread to dry on a thin slab of stone
laid over the top of a barrel. Meanwhile the hens had
gathered around her, hopeful of a feed, and she shooed
them away with her apron.
Beside the stoop at the back door was set a water-
pail into which an iron pipe discharged a copious jet
of spring water. The sight of this water direct from
the unsullied hills with its suggestion of coolness and
purity made me thirsty, and I at length decided to ask
for a drink. By the time 1 had climbed the hill to the
house, the woman had returned to the kitchen, and I
found her starting to make butter in a great upright
wooden churn. She had a poor opinion of butter
made in a churn turned by a crank, and declared she
couldn t abide the taste of it. The only right way to
get the best butter was to paddle the cream up and
down in one of these old-fashioned barrel contrivances.
In response to my request for water she got a
tumbler from the cupboard and accompanied me out
side to fill it. While I drank she took up her broom
and swept off the threshold, and then stood gazing down
the valley. The outlook over the woodland glen,
with its flanking of green ridges and the silvery stream
twinkling into view here and there, was very beautiful,
and I fancied she was admiring the scenery. But when
I ventured the opinion that she must enjoy having
Dwellers among the Catskills
245
a home in such a situation, she said that she was so
used to the scenery round about that she never thought
whether it was , _ -..._,-,._ ^. : ,, ,
pretty or not,
and she would
much rather
live in a village.
She was watch
ing the road for
her son. He
had been work
ing in Massa
chusetts, but he
was coming
home to stay
now. " It s a ter
rible place for
malaria, Mas
sachusetts is,"
she informed
me, "and he
couldn t stand
it there."
I went on presently and continued as far as " Lar-
kin s," the last house, at the extreme end of the valley.
The rhythmic beat of flails sounded from Larkin s barn
and enticed me to make a call. The farmer, a grizzled,
elderly man, and his son were threshing buckwheat on
A Home on the Mountain Side
246 New England and its Neighbors
the barn floor. They dealt with about a dozen of the
brown bundles at a time, standing them on end in
regular order three feet or so apart, and giving the tops
of each in turn a few judicious raps with the flails that
set the dark kernels flying in all directions. As soon
as a bundle that the threshers were belaboring toppled
over, the blows became more energetic, and it was well
cudgelled from end to end. To do the job thoroughly
the bundles were turned and rethreshed once or twice,
and then the straw was pitched out into the barn-yard
to rot for fertilizer. Every Catskill farmer has his
buckwheat fields, and these he plans shall yield enough
to make sure of a year s supply of buckwheat cakes
and some additional grain for spring cattle feed.
Larkin s cows were feeding in the home lot, and from
time to time he looked forth from the barn door to see
what they were about. They showed an inclination to
visit the orchard, and when he discovered them getting
too near the trees he sent his dog to drive them back.
cc We ain t keepin only four cows now/ he said.
cc We did have twelve or fifteen, but my wife n me
are gittin* old, and it was more n she ought to do takin*
care of the milk V makin* the butter from so many,
n I told her we d go into sheep. You c n see part o
my flock up there on the side o the mountain. I
always intend to have a bell on one o my sheep, but
I don t hear nawthin* of it to-day, n I guess it s got
lost off. A bell s quite a help in finding your sheep,
Dwellers among the Catskills
247
The Buckwheat Thresher Fair Weather or Foul r
and, besides, it keeps em together. They don t never
stray away very far from the bell sheep, V if you don t
have no bell, they git scattered and can t find each
other."
248 New England and its Neighbors
Larkin s farming was rather crude and so was that
of all the Snyder Hollowites. I wanted to see some
thing that smacked less of the wilderness, and after I
finished rny wanderings in the glen I took a train and
went west into the dairy country on the farther
Catskill borders. The sun had set, and it was growing
dark when I alighted at a little valley town and
looked about me at the big hills mounding, on every
side.
* c Where are the best farms here ? " I asked a young
fellow loitering on the station platform.
" Wai/ he responded, " the best farms around here
are up at Shacksville."
" How large a place is Shacksville, and how do I
get there ? " I questioned.
<c It ain t no place at all," was the reply. " It s just
farms. It s bout three miles thar by the road ; but
you c n cut off a good deal by goin cross-lots."
" How about lodging ? "
" No trouble about that. Jase Bascom ll keep you.
Do you see that signal light right up the track thar ?
A lane goes up the hill whar that light is, and it ain t
more n a mile n a half to Jase s by it."
" Could I find my way ? " I inquired doubtfully.
" Oh, yes ! They drawed wood down thar last
winter, V they put chains on their sled runners for
brakes, V that tore up things consid rable, so t the
track s plain enough. It takes you straight up to the
Dwellers among the Catskills 249
hill road, and then you turn to the left, and Jase s is
the fust house. You ll know the house when you git
to it by its settin up on kind of a terrace, and havin
two barns across the road."
Thus directed, I walked up the track to the signal
light, crawled through a pair of bars, and found a
rutted, unfenced trail leading up a great pasture hillside.
At first it was easily followed, for much of the earth
that had been torn up by the chain brakes had washed
away from the steep incline and left a waste of stones.
I toiled on for a half-hour, and reached the top of the
rise. The darkness had been increasing, and when at
this point the ruts and stones merged into unbroken
turf, I could not descry whither the track led. A
faint new moon shining in the hazy sky helped some
in revealing the lay of the land, but everything was
strange to me, and my bearings were a good deal in
doubt. Presently I came to a patch of woodland,
which, so far as I could discover, was perfectly pathless.
I did not care to stumble about at random in its dense
shadows, and I kept along its borders until it was
passed.
Now I began crossing open, stone-walled fields.
The walls were a nuisance. Their sturdy barriers net
worked the whole upland, and I was constantly brought
to a standstill by them and had to put my toes into
their niches and scramble over. After a while I
climbed into a broad cow lane. Surely, that would
250 New England and its Neighbors
take me to some habitation, and I stepped along briskly.
Yes, at the end of the lane I came to a group of farm
buildings a barn looming against the sky close at
hand, and a house and sheds among the trees just down
the hill. But no light shone from the house windows,
and the weedy barn-yard showed that the place was
deserted.
I searched about in the gloom and found another
lane that apparently afforded egress, and I followed it
over the gray hills for a mile. Then it joined a high
way, and my spirits rose. Not far distant was a house
on a terrace, and two barns stood opposite, across the
road. It must be Jase Rascom s, I thought. A dog
began barking warningly and came down into the
roadway and confronted me ; but a sniff or two seemed
to reassure him, and he ceased his clamor. I went up
the terrace steps, rapped at the door, and when it was
opened asked for Mr. Bascom.
He had gone to bed, I was informed ; but that did
not prevent my arranging to stay for a few days. No
one else had retired, and the rest of the family were sit
ting about the kitchen, except for the hired man, who
was snoozing on the lounge. Supper had been eaten
an hour or two previously, and the dishes had been
washed and replaced on the long table. But now Mrs.
Bascom and her two daughters hastened to remove the
blue fly-netting that covered the table, and clear a space
for me. They granted my request for a bowl of bread
A MORNING WASH AT THE BACK DOOR
Dwellers among the Catskills 251
and milk, and added cookies and cake, and a square of
delicious honey in the honeycomb. I had rye bread,
as well as wheat, and enjoyed its moist, nutty sweet
ness. This pleased Mother Bascom, who said, "Jason
and me always uses rye, but the young folks think
they can t eat nothin but wheat/ 1
By the young folks she meant the three grown-up
children who remained on the farm Sarah, Ollie,
and Eb.
The kitchen was neatly papered, and the rough,
warped floor was still bright with its annual spring
coating of yellow paint. All around the walls were
frequent nails, from which hung towels, hats, coats, etc.
A big wooden clock stood on a shelf near the cellar
stairway, and on a longer shelf back of the stove were
a row of lamps, a match-box, and a stout hand-bell
used to call the men to their meals. Behind the stove
on the floor was a wood-box, close beside which, hang
ing on a nail, was a home-made bootjack. This was
the especial property of Mr. Bascom, who continued
to wear stout leather boots in winter and in wet weather.
But what impressed me most in the furnishings of
the room was its five cushioned rocking-chairs just
enough to go around the family and leave the lounge
for the hired man. The father s chair was in a warm
corner next the stove, and on the window-casing near
at hand hung his favorite musical instrument a jews -
harp.
252 New England and its Neighbors
The evening was cool, and presently Ollie went to
the wood-box to replenish the fire. " Don t put in but
one stick," directed her mother. " You know we got
those apples drying in that there back oven, and if
you make it too hot, they ll cook instead o dryin ."
" We had ought to have a new stove," declared
Ollie. " The top o this one is all warped and
cracked with the fires we make in the winter."
The stovepipe ran up through the ceiling, and I
learned later that all the pipes in the house were
arranged likewise. The house was built fifty years
ago, and in those days when stoves had recently
superseded fireplaces it was thought quite sufficient
to have the chimneys begin either in the garret or
near the ceiling in the chambers. If it was the latter
alternative, a narrow cupboard was usually constructed
beneath.
" Can you keep a fire in the kitchen stove over
night?" I inquired.
" No," replied Mrs. Bascom, " but we can in the
settm -room stove. We got a big sheet-iron stove
in there, and all we have to do is to put in chunks
and shut the dampers tight."
" I must git me a half pound o powder next time
I m down to the village," remarked Eb after a pause.
* e I might want to go huntin* some lowery day."
" What do you hunt ? " I asked.
" Oh, mostly squirrels and pa tridges just now. A
Dwellers among the Catskills 253
little later we ll be on the lookout for foxes. We got
a good hound to trail em, and last winter we shot
seven. Their skins was worth a dollar n a half to two
dollars. Coons is good game, too. We git as many
.as eighteen or .twenty some years, and then ag in not
more n three or four. They fetch about a dollar.
I s pose we make more money out o skunks as a rule
than anything else. One year me V another feller
got seventy-eight. Part of em we trapped, but the
most we got by diggin . Every thaw in the winter
they d come out, and we d track em to their holes.
The snow was deep, and not much frost in the
ground, and it wa n t as hard diggin as you might
think. There was one hole we found twelve in.
You know they don t make their own holes, but use
those the woodchucks have dug. Sometimes we d
find woodchucks in the same hole with the skunks.
They wouldn t live right alongside o the skunks,
though, but in a branch passage. Skunk skins
fetched from thirty-five cents to a dollar n a quarter
that year, n we averaged sixty or seventy cents, I ll
warrant ye.
" Wai," said Eb, with a yawn at the conclusion of
these particulars, " I guess it s bedtime. We don t
stay up very late here, for father s callin us to git up
about the middle o the night."
By the time I was out the next morning Mrs.
Bascom and Ollie were coming in from milking.
254 New England and its Neighbors
Their outer skirts were tucked up, and they wore big
aprons and sunbonnets. These two never failed to
help the men milk, but the other daughter stayed
indoors getting the breakfast. Practically all the
women in the region milked, though the young girls
were beginning to question its being one of their
duties. For instance, at the next house up the road
was a maiden who had " learnt to play on the pianner,
and she won t go near the barn any more."
The Bascoms had about four hundred acres, one-
third of it cultivated, and the rest pasturage and
woodland. They kept a sleek herd of Jerseys, num
bering not far from fifty, and sold the milk to a
creamery. The women before they returned to the
house had assisted in unloosing the cows from their
stanchions, and then Mr. Bascom, staff in hand, con
ducted the herd to " pastur ." He did all the driving
by shouting. The cows strung along the road for a
long distance, but they understood the farmer s voice,
and he had no trouble in making them turn in at
the proper barway.
When he came back, he and Eb and the hired man
gathered at a long wooden trough of flowing water
just outside the back door and washed their hands
and faces.
"We don t keep it as tidy as we might out back
thar," said Mr. Bascom, apologetically, to me as the
family were sitting down at the breakfast table; " but
ON THE WAY TO THE BARN TO HELP MILK
Dwellers among the Catskills 255
we ain t got time to tend to things the way they do
round city houses."
"Aunt Jessie ought to be here/ remarked Sarah,
and they all laughed.
" She s a town woman, Aunt Jessie is," explained
Mrs. Bascom, " and she s bound to have everythin
just so. Well, she was stayin here last summer, and
one day she took the butcher knife and went out and
cut all the weeds growin round the back door. Then
she come in complain in how dretfully her back ached.
But nobody didn t ask her to cut the weeds. She
might V let em alone. They wa n t hurtin nothinY
After we had eaten breakfast Eb hitched a pair of.
horses into the market wagon and drove down to the
village creamery three miles distant with the great cans
of milk. This was a daily task of his the year through.
Mr. Bascom before going out to work sat down in his
rocking-chair and smoked a pipe of tobacco. " Eb s
got to git his off horse shod," said he, " and he won t
be home afore noon, I bet four cents." Apparently the
others concurred in his opinion, for no one accepted this
wager.
Meanwhile, the hired man had shouldered a great,
long-toothed reaper known as a "cradle," and gone
off to cut a late field of buckwheat, and the women
were hustling around doing the housework. Ollie
got ready some mince-meat, Sarah started to make
potato yeast with the intention that evening of
256 New England and its Neighbors
"sponging up some bread over night," and there
was other baking and stewing going forward. Most
of the summer housework was done in a rear ell of the
dwelling, that until a few years ago was chiefly used as
a dairy. In a corner of the main room had stood the
big barrel churn, and the floor was deeply worn where
the churn had been canted on edge, and rolled into
position and out again. From a shed adjoining, a
wooden arm was still thrust through the wall ready to
be attached to the paddle handle, and in the shed were
wheels and cogs, and a revolving, slanting platform, on
which two dogs used to be tied to walk up the incline
until the churning was finished. Excepting Sunday, the
cream was churned every day in the week. The butter
was packed away in tubs that were stored on the cool
floor of a cellarlike apartment running back into the
bank at the far end of the dairy.
Neighboring the ell were a number of rude little shan
ties a hog-pen, corn-house, hen-house, and smoke
house. The last was only four or five feet square, and
seemed to be a storage-place for rubbish as I saw it, but
it was cleared out whenever ham, bacon, or beef was to
be smoked. Against one side of it, two flour barrels
were set up on slabs of stone. They had been freshly
filled with ashes, and Mother Bascom was preparing
to make soft soap. Near by was an enormous iron
kettle half full of water with a fire burning under it.
" Most folks leech their ashes the day afbrehand,"
MAKING SOFT SOAP
Dwellers among the Catskills 257
Mrs. Bascom informed me, "and that s what you have
to do if you use cold water, but I heat the water and let
it run through the ash barrels in the forenoon. Right
after dinner I put my grease and scraps into the kittle
and pour in the lye, and by three o clock I ve got a
barrel or more of soap made and am ready to go into
the house. I leave the soap in the kittle till the next
day. It bursts the barrel if it s put in afore it s cool.
We store it down cellar. Twould be some handier to
keep it upstairs, but twould freeze sometimes in winter
and dry up in summer."
"This kettle looks like a very old one," I sug
gested.
"We ve had it ever sin I c n remember," responded
Mrs. Bascom. " It s an old residenter. We use it
mostly to boil swill in, but it comes handy in a good
many ways. Years ago we boiled down sap in it ; but
smoke and ashes and everything would get into the
sap while twas boilin and the sugar would be black as
the kittle. It tasted all right, though."
" Isn t it rather early in the fall to make soap ? "
said I.
" Yes, it is, and I ve got plenty left from my spring
makin ; but I was afraid it might be cold weather by
the next new moon."
"Does the moon affect it?" I asked.
" Oh, yes ; if you make it in the old of the moon,
you ve got to boil and boil, , Seems as though you d
258 New England and its Neighbors
never git through. They say the best time to make is
the full moon in May, but I ain t particular about the
month myself."
Another thing which Mrs. Bascom declared must be
done with proper regard for the moon was hog-killing.
" Kill a hog in the old of the moon, and it all goes to
grease," she said. " The meat fries up and there ain t
much left. I ve heard sayings, too, about planting in
the new of the moon, but the only thing we re careful
about puttin in then is cucumbers."
From all that I heard in the Catskills I was im
pressed that old sayings were still accepted there among
the farm folk with childlike faith. Another manifes
tation of their power in Mother Bascom s case had to
do with a thrifty specimen of that odd plant known as
hens-and-chickens, which she had growing in a pail be
side the front door. She said she picked off the buds
as fast as they formed, because if they were to blossom
and go to seed there would be a death in the family.
The prevalence of rustic superstition was again
emphasized when the hired man mentioned that the
beech trees were unusually well loaded with nuts and
quoted " they say " as an authority for this being pro
phetic of a hard winter.
" Do you think that is so ? " I questioned.
" Wai, I believe thar is a little into it," he replied.
We were on the borders of the buckwheat field,
and he was just preparing to return to the house for
Dwellers among the Catskills 2.59
dinner. Below us in the hollow was an old farm-house
and a number of ruinous sheds. I asked about their
owner.
" Jim Gamp lives thar," said my companion, " but
he rents the place from Andrew Fuller. Andrew
Fuller is the big gun of this town and has got farms
and mortgages all around. He s rather of an old hog,
though, and when he gits a chance to skin a man he
does it. Jim s been wantin him to fix up the build
ings, but the old whelp won t do a thing. Jim s had
to patch the barn roof with boards, but it leaks in spite
of him. The barn s too small, anyway. There ain t
room in it for his crops, and he has to stack a good
share of his hay outdoors. I expect, though, he s
kind o shiftless, or he d git along better. Do you see
those oats just beyond the house ? He got em into
bundles and left em in the field. I ll bet ye they ve
stood there two months. They ain t good for much
now oats or straw, either."
I spoke of the numerous lines of stone wall that
crisscrossed Jim Gamp s land, and the hired man said
that he had calculated there were miles of walls on
every fair-sized farm in the neighborhood, and if the
labor of building these walls was estimated at a reason
able rate it would often exceed what the entire farms
would sell for to-day.
" I notice you have a good deal of hawkweed in thi*
buckwheat," I said as we started homeward.
260 New England and its Neighbors
"Yes, it s gettin* in everywhar through the fields
and pastor s. Its leaves spread out flat and cover the
ground, so *t where it grows the grass is all killed
out It s the worst darn stuff you ever see in haying.
__ i There s a little
I fuzz or some
thing about it
that s enough
to make you
cough yourself
to death/
We had left
the buckwheat
field now and
passed through
a gap in the
fence and were
on the highway.
" Doesn t the
snow drift on
these roads ? "
I asked.
"It would if
n . v r t. ^ the farmers
Binding Indian Corn -,.-, t
5 didn t cut the
brash along the sides. They re obliged to do that by
law, and usually they cut it in the summer after hay-
ing 5 and it lies then till spring, when they burn it;
Dwellers among the Catskills 261
but we hain t given this road along here no attention
so far this year."
It was not much travelled, and occasional strips of
grass grew between the wheel tracks, while on either
hand the briers, weeds, and bushes ran riot rasp
berries and blackberries, milkweeds hung full of pods,
jungles of tansy, elecampane, life-everlasting, Jacob s-
ladder, fireweed, etc. In a ravine where we crossed a
brook, were several clumps of skunk-cabbage which
the hired man said had spread from Bill Hastings s
meadow, up above.
" Thar never none growed around here," he con
tinued, " until Bill fetched some of it or had it sent
from his relatives in New Jersey, He set it out thar
by the rear of his house and he uses the root for a medi
cine he takes. He offered to fix me some when I was
feelin a little off the hooks a while ago, and I told him
if it was a question between dyin an skunk-cabbage I
was ready to take the stuff; but bein as I wa n t that
bad off yet I wouldn t trouble him. Bill s the greatest
feller for swallerin medicines ever I knowed makes
em himself out of weeds and things. He was stewin
up some leaves o this here elecampane t other day
when I was to his house. Goin to try it for his liver,
I believe. It must be pretty bitter, for I never saw
nawthin would eat elecampane leaves till the grasshop
pers was so blame thick this summer. They trimmed
it up some. They e t tansy, too e t it bare to the
262 New England and its Neighbors
stalks. We re always havin some pest nowadays.
Have you noticed how many dead trees there are
scattered through the woods ? They ll give ye an idee
o what the forest worms done here last year. They
stripped the woods so t there wa n t hardly a leaf left."
Just then the hired man stopped and pointed to a
slender sapling growing out of the roadside wall. It
was loaded with tiny scarlet fruit. "I m goin to
have a few o them thar pin-cherries," said he, and he
pushed through an intervening clump of sumachs and
pulled off a handful. " That s robbin the pa tridges
o* their winter provender," he remarked as he shared
his spoils with me, " but I guess they ll stan it." And
we plodded on, nibbling at the sour little globules
until we reached the house.
Such walks as this along the upland roadways were
a constant pleasure during my stay at the Bascoms .
There was only one thing I enjoyed better, and that
was to sit in the lee of a stone wall in lazy contempla
tion of the landscape. We were having genuine au
tumn weather chill air and a blustering wind, sailing
clouds and bursts of sunshine. Tinges of red and
gold were beginning to appear in the trees, and nearly
everything in the plant world had gone to seed. Yet
the fields were still alive with strident insects, the flies
and bees buzzed cheerfully, and in the quiet of my
loitering places I was sure to be visited by certain in
vestigating ants and spiders. The country I over-
Dwellers among the Catskills
263
looked was one to fall in love with great rounded
hills, their summits wooded, and their slopes and the
valleys laid off endlessly in green fields and pastures.
How beautiful it all was, and how grateful the shelter
of those brown, lichened walls !
Considering
XII
A CANAL-BOAT VOYAGE ON THE HUDSON
E
VER since I
have known
the Hudson as
a real live river and
not simply as a crooked
streak on the map, I
have had the wish to
gain a closer acquaint-
ance with the life on
the canal-boats, whose
long, lazy tows are one
of the stream s notable
features. Each even
ing, in the warm-
weather months, a tow
Trading with a Bumboat o f these deep - laden
craft just out from the Erie Canal leaves Albany for
New York.
They always make the trip back and forth in the
wake of a steam vessel. One might fancy they would
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 265
journey southward drifting with the current, but the
river is too slow even for canal-boats, its progress
seaward being barely eight miles a day. As you watch
the tows from the shores you see people on the boats,
you see little cabins at the sterns with stovepipes stick
ing out of the roofs, and you see many lines of washing
flying. The tows, indeed, are floating villages, and
there is a touch of romance about them that stirs the
onlooker s gypsy blood at once.
With me, at any rate, the impulse to make a voyage
on a tow was very strong. Here was the chance to
see a novel phase of life, and that amid the famous
scenery of the Hudson. If the canal-boat folk would
take me, I would make one trip down the river, at
least.
It was late in the afternoon, and I was in Albany
wandering along the wharves. The day was dull, and,
to a stranger, the high, rusty warehouses and breweries
flanking the river were depressing. A number of canal-
boats were moored along shore, some low and snug,
some loaded high with an unwieldy bulk of lumber
or hay. There was not much going on aboard them.
Two or three men were doing odd jobs about the
decks, and a woman in a pink waist was standing at a
cabin door and looking out on the river. The only
attention I got was from a lad dozing on a cabin roof,
who, at sight of my valise, roused up and asked what
I was peddling. Things were equally quiet on the
266 New England and its Neighbors
wharves. A few boys and men were loitering about,
but there was no stir, no activity, not even in the vicin
ity of the frequent corner saloons.
I was half wishing to give up the trip, when three
canal-boats arrived from up the river, and the tug in
charge pushed them in to the wharf near where I
stood. I spoke to a man who jumped on shore with
a rope, and he pointed out one of the rough, sun
burned working-men on the boats and said that was the
"captain" he was the man who owned the three
boats, and if I wanted to go to New York he was the
one to talk with.
The captain, who in dress and looks was no differ
ent from his fellows, proved friendly, and was perfectly
willing I should go down the Hudson on his vessels.
I offered to pay my fare, but he said " No " emphati
cally, and added : cc I don t want any money. It s no
trouble. Most of my crew left when we got to the
end of the canal, and there s room enough. But you ll
have to take things as they are. I can t answer for
what your bed ll be. Like enough it isn t fit for you,
and then again it may be all right. It s just as the men
left it, and they re sometimes pretty dirty fellows."
But I could go. That was a relief, for the uncer
tainty of ways and means when one is starting out on
such an expedition always keeps one s spirits at a low
ebb. I did not worry much over possible hardships.
"I don t know how you ll manage about your
THE CALL TO DINNER
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 267
meals," the captain continued. " Usually I have my
wife and children along, but this time I ve got a house
keeper. My wife took sick last month and she stayed
at home this trip ; so I had to get Mrs. Libbey to
cook and tend to the other work, and I don t know
how she ll feel about taking a boarder. Perhaps she ll
think she has enough to do now. You ll have to fix
that with her. The best way is to speak to her your
self when you find her out on deck. If she don t
want the job, why, you can get all you want to eat
to-morrow from the bumboats."
With this the captain turned to his work. I did not
want to run the risk of going hungry till to-morrow
and leave the chance of getting something then to the
" bumboats," whatever those might be. So I went on
shore and visited a meagre little grocery not far away,
where I bought a supply of cookies and a can of salmon.
With these I thought I could hold body and soul
together the entire trip if necessary.
The weather was threatening, and evening came
early. Lanterns were lit on the boats, and lights
twinkled out one by one all about the river and along
the shores. Presently a horn blew, and the cap
tain and the two men, Duncan and Hugh, who
made up the river crew, strolled down into Mrs. Lib-
bey s cabin on the best boat to have supper. I was on
the point of going after my can of salmon and bag of
cookies when the captain reappeared and invited me to
268 New England and its Neighbors
come in and eat with the others. He said he had fixed
things with Mrs. Libbey, and I could pay her for
my board whatever I saw fit when we reached New
York.
This made me one of the family, and I followed the
captain s lead and crooked myself down into the cabin.
The ceiling barely missed one s head, the walls were
honeycombed with cupboards and drawers, and there
was a folding bed in one corner and a cook-stove in
another. The floor was covered with oil-cloth, and the
whole place was neat and orderly. The table filled
the middle of the room. Most of the chairs were
nothing but backless camp-stools that could be closed
up and tucked away when not in use. The table was
not so large but that everything on it could be reached
without much stretching, and I was invited to draw up
and help myself. We had beans, meat, potato, bread
and butter, crackers, and tea ; and the fare right through
the voyage was plain and coarse, but not unwholesome.
The canal-boat people were inclined to neglect their
forks as conveyances for food, and each reached his
own knife to the butter-plate from time to time. How
ever, these customs are not peculiar to canal-boats. We
four men left little spare room at the table, and Mrs.
Libbey sat back near the stove and chatted, and saw
that our cups were kept filled with tea.
By the time I returned to the deck preparations were
being made to start, Dusky figures were moving
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 269
about on the boats and on the wharves, conspicuous
among them a short, slouch-hatted man who, with much
swearing and violence of manner, was making up the
tow. There were many lights on the river yellow,
red, and green. Tugs were moving hither and yon,
whistling and puffing, and in the hazy air of the half-
clouded evening the scene seemed full of mystery and
strange noises.
At eight a great steamer just starting for New York
left its pier a quarter of a mile above, and its mountain
of lights drifted down past us. Except for the tall
smoke-stacks towering above the pile, its size and its
wealth of glow and glitter made it seem, as seen from
the humble canal-boats, a veritable " floating palace."
On an upper deck was a search-light peering about
with its one eye, flashing its bit of vivid illumination
now on this side the river, now on the other, bringing
out the color and form of all it touched with astonishing
clearness amid the surrounding night. As soon as the
steamer reached the open river its engines began to
pant, and it soon vanished on its swift course south
ward.
Shortly afterward the shore-lines of our tow of canal-
boats were cast loose, and we too were on our way down
the river. But ours was not the easy flight of the
brilliant passenger-boat that preceded us. Our long,
clumsy tow was being dragged through the gray even
ing gloom by a single stout steamer, and the blunt,
270 New England and its Neighbors
deep-laden canal-boats ploughed their way through the
dun waters very heavily. In our rear the sparkle of
the city lights slowly faded, and the glows in home
windows on the wooded shores grew fewer and farther
between.
Our tow included between thirty and forty boats,
made up in tiers of four abreast. The boats in each
tier were snug together, and though they sometimes
swung apart a foot or two, there was never much diffi
culty in stepping from one to the other. The captain
I had adopted owned three of the boats in our tier, and
the odd one was in charge of an elderly Frenchman,
his wife, two dogs, and a cat.
Responsibility was now past for the night, and it was
not long before everybody turned in. I had a bunk
in a little cabin at the rear of the middle one of our
three boats. This cabin was a kind of store-room a
catch-all for every sort of rubbish. Here were pieces
of harness, cast-off clothing, rags, tools, bolts, kerosene
cans, a tub of paint, etc. It had various odors, and
these were not improved when Duncan, my fellow-
roomer, lit a stout tin lamp and turned it low to burn
all night. The apartment was mostly below decks,
and as for ventilation, one could about as well have slept
in a dry-goods box with the cover on.
My bunk looked short, but there proved to be a
recess in the farther wall where I could stow away my
feet It was a bed without linen, and the coarse
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 271
blankets and bed-ticking pillow looked so uninviting
that I concluded to sleep on top in the clothes I had
on. A calico curtain was strung on a wire along the
front of the bunk. This I drew, and, with the dim
light of the lamp shining through it, and with the
swash of the water around the stern of the boat sound
ing in my ears, I went to sleep. On the whole, things
were very quiet, and, though the boat rolled a little and
now and then softly bumped against its neighbor, the
motion was so slight and we slipped along so smoothly
that it was hardly different from being on land.
When I clambered out on deck a little before six the
next day, the weather was still dubious, and during the
morning we had frequent scuds of rain. Toward noon
a thunder-storm came rumbling down on us from the
Catskills, but soon the sky showed signs of clearing, and
the head wind which had been tossing the waves into
whitecaps grew quieter.
Right after breakfast Mrs. Libbey had taken every
thing out of her cabin that could be taken out, set up
her wash-tub, and gone to washing. I suppose every
other woman on the tow did likewise. The first day
on the Hudson is always washing day, for on the sec
ond day the boats are in salt water, which sets back a
hundred miles up the river. In the brighter spells
between showers, clothes-lines had been hoisted on the
decks and a few garments swung on them ; but with
the first streak of sunshine after the thunder-storm,
272 New England and its Neighbors
- ^
V
Visiting
tubs were brought up to the open air, the clothes-lines
filled, and surplus garments were spread all about.
The boats with this abounding bunting had quite a gala
air.
The men began the day by feeding and caring for
the horses in the low stable-cabins at the bow of the
boats. The trip back and forth on the Hudson and
the stay in New York are the horses vacation, and in
spite of the narrowness of their quarters, they seemed
contented enough ; yet it moved one s pity to see their
galled shoulders and to see them cringe and plunge
when the men touched their sores to wash them or rub
on oil Our captain had seven horses. On the canal
they worked in two relays, three horses in one and four
in the other. The boats kept going night and day,
and it was steady work for the horses six hours on
and six hours off for all the week and a half it took
to go through the canal. " Their shoulders get very
tender/* said Duncan. " Some of the horses* after they
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 273
have had their rest and start in to work again, will rear
and kick, and it s all you can do to make em buckle
down to pull they re just that mean in disposition.
Still, you can t blame em. They re just like folks,
and a man with a sore toe would act worse n they do.
You see, their collars are bearing on their shoulders
all the time for six hours, and the chafing makes so
much heat that, with the sweat, it scalds them. If they
could only stop once in a while and have the collars
lifted up, so s to let the air under, they d be all right. *
The canal-boat horses undoubtedly have a hard
time, and it is the destiny of very many of them
to be drowned by being dragged into the water by a
fouled tow-line. When boats are passing each other,
and the line gets caught, unless it is unsnapped at once,
in go the horses. Sometimes the owner will leap into
the water to try to cut them loose, but it is dangerous
business.
After the men finished caring for the horses, they
turned their attention to cleaning the decks, which
they said had got " grimmy with dirt and soot." They
dipped up great quantities of water and dashed it all
about the premises, and then scoured off everything
with their brooms. This is a before-breakfast task of
daily recurrence. The plentifulness of the water sup
ply seems to give the canal-boat folk the same mania
for scrubbing that the Dutch have in Holland. They
used it copiously for everything. When a man washed
274 New England and its Neighbors
his face he dipped up a brimming pail for the purpose ;
and I suppose he would have used another pailful to
Drawing Water
brush his teeth in, only that is an attention to the
toilet usually dispensed with on the canal craft.
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 275
The general work of the day consisted in doing odd
jobs of tinkering, putting things in order, pumping the
water out of boats that leaked, mending harness, etc.
But there was plenty of leisure, and there was a great
deal of lounging and visiting. Hugh and Duncan
found time to attend to various affairs of their own,
and to read several chapters in some ragged paper
novels. Hugh, just before he settled down to reading,
invited me to call on him. He had slicked up the
cabin where he slept and given its atmosphere an indi
viduality of its own by fumigating it with sulphur for
the benefit of the cockroaches. Besides, he had
scoured or mopped it out after some fashion, and it
was so damp and chilly that he now concluded he
would start a fire. He had tried to improve the
appearance of his rust-coated stove by going over it
with kerosene, and when he kindled the fire its oil-
soaked surface began to smoke. In the depressions
of the covers intended for the insertion of the stove-
handle the kerosene had gathered in little pools, and
from these slim tongues of flame leaped up. It was a
curious-looking stove, and it sent out a curious-smell
ing smudge, but Hugh took it calmly. He was a
great, stout, hardy fellow, not to be disturbed by trifles.
He said he was going to the Klondike in the spring,
and already could see himself in his mind s eye picking
up the gold <c nudgets " there.
About ten o clock in the morning I had a chance to
276 New England and its Neighbors
find out what a bumboat was. It came from some
town on the distant shore a rude little steamer, not
much larger than a good-sized rowboat, peddling vege
tables, fruits, butter, milk, and, in the season, ice cream
and bottled drinks. It crept up to us piping its in
fantile whistle, and after fastening itself to the front
tier of boats and doing what trading it could, cast
loose, and with another announcement of attenuated
toots, dropped back to the next tier. Our tow was a
little world in itself. These bum boats constituted our
only connection with the rest of mankind, and the
excitements of the voyage are so few that their visits
were always welcome. The bumboats make the tows
their chief source of income, but they also do trading
along the wharves of their home towns and of villages
neighboring.
Each tier of the tow is separated from that in front
and behind by six or eight feet of water. The space
is spanned by a few strands of rope, but this makes so
slight a connection that sociability with neighbors who
precede or follow is to a large extent cut off. A man,
if he chooses, can put one leg over a rope and hitch
himself across the vacancy, but not many attempt this.
Our captain was the only one I saw do it. I suppose
there was no special danger, but I would prefer to have
something else below me than that turmoil of water if
I were to follow his example. He had put on a dress
coat right after dinner, and crossed the rope, and spent
X j iwybw** . 2 <^M;.>&t" - .^ ^fjys^^y^
. :&$#fm
m^^^^^^" :^
Two CANAL-BOAT CAPTAINS
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 277
half the afternoon roosted on a cabin roof talking with
Captain Jones, who owned two boats in the tier ahead
of us.
Our social intercourse was mostly with the old
Frenchman and his wife, who owned the antiquated
ice-boat in our tier. Our folks visited with them back
and forth by the hour. His strong point was politeness,
and hers talkativeness. They did a great deal of scrub
bing during the day, and in the afternoon, when there
was danger of running short of material to exercise
their scrubbing energy on, the wife exhumed a rug
of Brussels carpeting and laid it on the cabin roof.
The husband looked at her doubtfully out of the
corner of his eye when she poured a pail of water over
it. Then she rubbed on soap and scoured it with a
brush, and next squeezed the water out with a bit of
wood. After that she began at the beginning again,
with the pouring on of water, and so she continued, as
if bent on wearing the rug out. The man saw his roof
getting dirty, and mounted it with his broom and swept
it almost as assiduously as his wife scoured the carpet.
Now and then he would pause and look at her specu-
latively, as if it was beyond his ken what his wife s real
intentions were with regard to that carpet. Once he
inquired, mildly, if it wouldn t get dirty again, and she
said yes, it would be just as bad as ever in a week. At
this the man appeared a shade downcast, but he did
not venture to question the wisdom of the labor. His
278 New England and its Neighbors
wife scolded him well from time to time for his clumsi
ness. He was rather stiff, but he meant well, and I
thought she had an exaggerated idea of his incapacity.
He had a placating tone and a placating manner, but it
was apparently all lost on the woman.
It is not simply adults who live on the tows, but
whole families, from babies up to grandmothers ; and
it seemed to me that, being always on the water, they
were subject to peculiar dangers. I asked Duncan
about this. It was in one of the morning showers, and
he had got a pailful of suds from Mrs. Libbey, and
brought it over to our cabin to do some washing. He
fixed up a seat, put his dirty garments in the pail, and,
after expressing a longing for a wash-board, scrubbed
the clothes out on his knuckles. He said Mrs. Libbey
was willing enough to wash for him, but he didn t want
to be beholden to her. " If she did favors for me,
she d expect me to do em for her, and if I shouldn t
do em, why, she d chew about it somewhere."
In reply to my question about the canal-boat dan
gers, he told how, two years before, two girls lost their
lives. "They danced overboard," he said. "There
was a fiddle playin on the tier ahead, and they caught
hold of each other for a little waltz, and one of them
stepped over the side of the boat and she clung to
the other, and they both went in and were drownded."
Duncan now got up and put his head out of the
hatchway. Come here a minute," said he.
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 279
"You see that long, rocky island we re comin* to
with the woods on it ? Well, it was right about oppo
site to that I had a child of mine drownded. I owned
a boat in those days, and my wife and three children
were on board. There was a bumboat come up along
side the outer boat, and I went to go over to it with
one of the children, and my driver he took my little
girl, and we were goin to buy the children some candy ;
and when the man was steppin across from one boat
to another it must a been the boats pulled apart and
he didn t calculate right, and down they went. I never
see it happen, and I didn t look around until I heard
some one cry there was a man overboard. We got the
man out, but my little girl never rose. She must V
went in under the boats.
" We couldn t stop the tow, and I got off on the
bumboat and stayed behind. It was eight days before
we found the body. She d be seventeen years old
now, if she d lived. That sickened my wife of boat
ing. She was always afraid we d be losing our other
two children; so I sold out and bought a little ten-
acre farm. I got six children now, and my wife thinks
we better give em more education n they could get
on the canal ; and so I earn money summers boating,
while she runs the farm with the children, and I guess
we ll give em some schoolin . I didn t get much
myself. I went on the canal when I was ten, and
after I got to boatin you couldn t dog me off it.
280 New England and its Neighbors
Well, I tell you, I get thirty-five dollars a month and
board, and it s a steady job. There ain t many things
you could do better in."
With this he wrung out the pair of trousers he had
been at work on and carried them up to the deck
and hung them on the swaying rudder-handle.
There was no pause in our voyage. Night and
day alike we continued to toil steadily southward.
The steamer, dragging us by three sagging tow-ropes,
was so far on ahead that no sound came to us from
it save when it whistled, but we could see the meas
ured sway of its walking-beam, and we could see the
water breaking into foam beneath its paddles, and the
smoke drifting away from its tall chimneys.
On the morning of the third day, when I looked
out soon after sunrise, I found New York had come
into view, dim in the hazy south. We were passing
the last of the Palisades, and I regretted to think that
during the night we had gone by much of the river s
finest scenery. The most impressive view of the
trip was one I had had at Storm King the evening
before, and I doubt if the whole length of the river
affords anything finer. We had passed the twinkling
lights of Newburg, and I had gone below to while
away the evening, when the captain called to me. I
had not thought the Highlands so near, and the sight
from the deck was a surprise. The river had nar
rowed, and, on either hand, a rugged mountain
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 281
shouldered up into the sky. The full moon sailed
among the clouds,, and the great cliffs frowning down
on our gloomy line of canal-boats were very striking
and powerful.
Through the early voyage the shores were monoto
nous, and, lower down, where we should have seen the
blue ranges of the Catskills, the mists shrouded the
distance completely. Frequent residences looked out
on us from the wooded banks, and now and then we
passed a town. Often a great ice-house would loom
up at the water s edge, and on both sides of the river
were lines of railroad tracks where the trains at close
intervals were speeding along, sending out to us the
faint rumble of their wheels and the sharp notes of
their whistles. These were the chief land features,
while such was the great size of the river itself that
though it is a great highway, the craft on it seemed
few and far between until we neared New York.
The Steamer dragging the Tow
282 New England and its Neighbors
We had the city in sight at dawn, but the tide was
against us, and we were all the morning reaching our
destination at its lower end. The sun shone clear
and hot, and the glare of the white-painted boats,
added to the heat, made the exposed deck rather
uncomfortable. Still, there was a fascination about
the approach to the city that made it impossible
to stay long in the cabins. The multitude of build
ings, the shipping that crowded the miles of wharves
and filled the wide river with the coming and going
of vessels of all sorts and sizes, roused us and kept
our interest on tiptoe. ;
One member of our fleet s company I had seen little
of heretofore, but to-day he was much in evidence.
This was a young man who was a passenger like myself,
only he was wholly penniless and slept under a manger
among the horses. There he had dozed away most of
the voyage. Hugh said the man was "working" his
way to New York, but that must have been metaphor,
for I never saw him do anything that looked like labor.
The day previous I had learned that he had had nothing
to eat since we left Albany, and that moved me to crawl
down into his stable-cabin and offer my cookies and
can of salmon. He accepted hungrily, and began to
eat at once just where he was, under the manger. This
last day he showed more spirit, and was out on deck in
the sun watching the city with considerable interest.
He was a seedy, shiftless-looking fellow. His cloth-
^^^ ;3 ;;rf^ .:
^ ^^ ^" ^^^
HOUSE-CLEANING TIME
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 283
ing was dirty and ragged, his shoes were breaking out,
his necktie was frayed, and his felt hat had holes worn
through in the creases. He talked with the crew freely,
and spoke of himself as a " prodigal son." He said
his father was a New York broker and a man of wealth.
He could imagine him with his arms open to receive
him and ready to put a ring on his finger and kill the
fatted calf. " It s more likely, though," he added,
"that I m the fatted calf that ll get killed. Still, I
haven t bothered the old gent for over a year now,
and he ought to be thankful for that."
There was a general effort on the part of the
inhabitants of the tow to make a good appearance in
our approach to the metropolis. Clothes-lines were
taken in ; the rough, everyday working garments were
changed for better, and most of the men took pains
to shave. When you saw them at their best, they
were by no means unattractive.
On the whole, I got an agreeable impression of the
canal-boat folk. There was a home air about them
that was unexpected. They were hard-working and
thrifty, and the drinking habit was the exception rather
than the rule. To be sure, the men swore a good deal,
even in their ordinary conversation, but they did this
with no air of profanity. It was just an. oil to the flow
of their remarks. In their feeling it apparently made
what they said clearer, and themselves more compan
ionable. The women, too, made free with slang and
284 New England and its Neighbors
spiced their remarks with " Gosh/ " poor devil/
" damn/ and even rougher expressions, yet they were
not without a certain refinement.
Our captain was probably a fair example of the
successful canal-boatman. He had started on the canal
as a driver when ten years old. Now, at the age
of thirty-five, he owned three boats that were worth
on an average $2000 each, and he also owned a
fifteen-acre farm. The farm produces hay enough
to winter his horses and twenty others, and he values
it at $5000. He was sober and hard-working, and it
is only such who ever rise to the ownership of boats.
There is a rougher element on the canal. These are
the " trippers " men hired as drivers just for the
passage through the canal. They are often hard
characters with no more clothes than they wear on
their backs, and, as soon as they are paid off, take a
vacation and spend all their gains in a spree before
they go to work again. " Yes," said Duncan, " soon
as the trippers get their money they blow it all right
in that same night. Next morning when they re sober
ing up, they ll do most anything to get some more
drink. Why, one feller sold me a pair of rubber
boots for a quarter, that he d paid two-ninety for a
few days before, but he said he was bliged to have
the liquor anyhow/
Most captains take no notice of Sundays, yet
there are those who tie up on the Sabbath and go to
A Canal-boat Voyage on the Hudson 285
church. They will even lose three or four hours of
Saturday rather than be where there is no church.
But wages go on Sunday the same as week-days, and
the average man sees a clear loss of five or six dollars
in tying up, and he thinks he can t afford it.
Some of the families winter on their boats lying at
the wharves in New York City, and they say they do
it very comfortably. Mrs. Libbey told of a friend
who tried living in a tenement instead. The family
paid eighteen dollars a month rent, and it was a
crowded, stifling little place, not nearly so good as a
canal-boat.
The freighting season lasts from May to December,
and in the cold weather the majority of the boat-folk
are at their home villages in central New York. They
don t work very hard in winter, they said, but just dress
well and have a good time. The women, in particular,
enjoy the winter. "The summer," said Hugh, "is
all rain for them, but the winter is all sunshine."
The men mostly marry girls brought up on the
canal, and when they do pick out a girl unused to the
boating environment they are apt to find they made a
mistake, for she usually is not fitted for the life and
" can t get to like it."
Noon came, and we had arrived opposite the pictur
esque jumble of lofty buildings at the lower end of the
city. A little later we were making fast to a pier down
near the Battery, and I prepared to leave. Personally, I
2 86 New England and its Neighbors
had received only kindness and hospitality on the trip,
and the voyage had held so much that was novel and
interesting that it was with real regret that I left the
canal-boats and became an ordinary landsman once
more.
Arriving in New York
XIII
THE AUTUMN CATTLE SHOW
IN New England s
purely farming
districts the cattle
show is the one event
of the year that attains
to genuine greatness.
It is in such districts
you see it at its best
a rural picnic that
draws to it the people
of all the countryside.
The Nigger Target The towns and v ; llages
roundabout are depopulated. I am not sure that the
ministers go, but the church elders are on hand with
their fat cattle and all the varied farm belongings in
which they take pride; and so are their wives and
daughters and other members of the family, even to
the hired man.
It is the social element which gives the fair its most
vital attraction. The people come not so much because
287
288 New England and its Neighbors
of the races, the exhibits, and the pleasure-making
contrivances, as because of the certainty of meeting
all their friends and acquaintances. In the two days
of the show they pick up more news than they would
in months of ordinary days. " I ain t seen you sence
the cattle show last year," you will hear one woman
say to another. " Why don t you come and make me
a call once in a while ? It ain t but eight miles/ And
when the preliminary whys and wherefores have been
settled to mutual satisfaction they fall to detailing the
happenings of the past twelve months, lingering with
especial minuteness over the ravages of death and
disease.
Perhaps there is no better place to see the country
fair than at Cummington, in western Massachusetts,
a town that possesses the double distinction of having
the cattle-show grounds of the district, and of being
the birthplace of William Cullen Bryant. It lies
among the tumbled hills which abound in that part
of the state, and is far from railroads and large centres
of population. The region for many miles around is
one of scattered farms and little villages. Probably
no town tributary to the fair contains much over one
thousand inhabitants, and some fall a good deal short
of that number.
The fair is held the last of September. Autumn
comes early on the hills. All the corn is cut and
stacked in the fields. Nature s year s work is about
The Autumn Cattle Show 289
finished. Nearly all the banditti weeds and flowering
plants of field and wood are weighted with seeds, or
the seeds have flown and only empty husks remain.
The road by which I approached the fair-grounds
led much of the way through the woodlands, orange
and yellow with turning leafage. Dwellings were few
and far between, and it was nothing unusual to drive
for miles without seeing aught more closely related to
a human habitation than a lonely gray sugar-house
in a patch of rock maples. Sometimes a squirrel
chattered at me, sometimes a crow flapped into view
overhead, gave a disturbed caw or two, and hastened
away, and once I roused a partridge that disappeared
with a startled whir of wings. But as a whole the
woods were very quiet. The last few miles of the
way I did not lack company. There were teams
before and teams behind a long string of them
climbing the final hill, bumping over the " thank-you-
marms " and rattling across, one after the other, the
frequent little wooden bridges that spanned the rivulets
the road encountered. Most of them were family
teams of two or three seats, but there were many top
buggies cleaned up for the occasion, each holding " a
fellow and his girl." Then there were the confirmed
old bachelors, who rode alone ; and there was the
more pronounced jockey element represented by men
who usually brought along a single male companion.
As I neared the grounds I began to see teams hitched
290 New England and its Neighbors
to the trees along the roadside. The owners were
careful not to leave anything of value in their vehicles,
and every man who had a whip that was worth stealing
insured its safety by taking it along with him. When
ever and wherever you met him later in the day you
would find him with the whip in his hands.
The grounds with their one-third of a mile race
course lay in an elevated hollow of the hills that
seemed to be the only spot in the region sufficiently
level to lay out such a track. Immediately surround
ing were either rough depressions or rocky ridges,
and sx>me of this wild land was inside of the high
board fence that engirdled the fair-grounds.
By paying a little extra one was privileged to drive
his team through the entrance gate and keep it on
the grounds all day if he chose. A favorite resort of
vehicles was a grassy hill that rose within the circle
of the race-course. Here the wagons were left while
the horses were led away to he hitched elsewhere.
If you arrived after things got well going, you struck
pandemonium the moment you passed through the
wide wooden gates. " Fakirs " and travelling tradesmen
had been coming by every road all the day before, and
the centre of the grounds was now full of booths
and tents, with an intermingling of peddling wagons
and s.tands and amusement paraphernalia. The place
was a great human beehive. Those who had come
to make money strove to attract trade by continual
The Autumn Cattle Show
191
shouting, and a brass band played enlivening strains at
frequent intervals, while the crowd itself was in con
stant motion, and there was a never ceasing undertone
of voices talking, calling, and laughing. It was a
motley throng,
including peo
ple of every
age, from babies
and toddlers up
to nonagena
rians. Many
of the folk were
dressed taste
fully and in
modern styles,
but others, by
reason of care
lessness or isola
tion or poverty,
wore garments
that were very
Children Sightseers
antiquated. Then, too, there seemed to be a curious
difference of opinion as to whether winter or summer
apparel was the more appropriate.
Some of the attendants were strange-looking peo
ple, suggestive of caricature raw, long-haired boys,
gnarled men with quaintly trimmed beards, and faded
women, the lines and expressions of whose faces
292 New England and its Neighbors
brought up before one visions of olden times. On
the other hand, there were present more or less city
folk, to whom a rural jollification of this sort was a
very real pleasure. Another class of outsiders was that
of the gentry politicians of the county, who had come
to pull wires in anticipation of the approaching elec
tion, and to pose in the eyes of the public as genial
good fellows.
Wherever the crowd gathered thickest there hovered
peddlers of pop-corn, peanuts, grapes, peaches, and five-
cent cigars the standard price at cattle shows. There,
too, you found the man with the bunch of colored bal
loons. While in his hands they pulled jauntily sky
ward, but once transferred to the children they were
very apt to soon burst or droop to earth. The itiner
ant hawker and distributor of happiness who seemed
to JDC most successful was one who carried little striped
whips, and squeaky whistles with rubber sacks on the
end. " Catbags " was the expressive name of these
whistles. You blew and distended the rubber, then
took it away from your mouth, and the thing emitted
a long, wailing piping quite enchanting to the ears of
childhood; but to older people the noise was rather
distracting after it had been heard continuously for a
few hours.
Not all the interest was confined to the show
grounds. Just outside, near the entrance, was a
peculiar gathering of men who were getting all the
The Autumn Cattle Show
293.
fun they could without going in. They were toughs
and ne er-do-wells who drove rusty, ancient vehicles
and abused-looking horses, which they were always
Without the Gate
ready to swap or sell. Toward noon, when I went out
for a stroll, most of the gang were collected about an
old negro. He was sitting in a shaky buggy, and was
trying to get an offer for his old white nag. " There
ain t a blemish on him," the negro declared, and he
cantered his steed down the road to show his paces.
The dickering was long-drawn-out and resultless,
and finally the negro said he must go home and get
something to eat. As he started off, he remarked :
"Well, I can t sell you this horse, gentlemen, an I
can t swap him. Nobody don t want such a horse
cause he s a poor horse."
294 New England and its Neighbors
Cattle show gets its name from its exhibit of farm
creatures, and these, either in pens or tied to lines of
railing, occupied an acre or two on the inner borders
of the race-course. About them the men gathered in
force to discuss the merits of the various animals.
Hence, in that vicinity you got a concentrated essence
of Yankee smoking, spitting, and dialect such as it
would not be easy to match the world over.
The centre of interest for the women was a large,
barnlike, two-story hall, the most prominent structure
The Stage from the Neighboring Town
on the grounds. In it were exhibited a thousand and
one products of housewifely art and of agricultural
success. One section was devoted to flowers from
home flower-beds. Some were in pails, some in pots.
The Autumn Cattle Show 295
and some in cheese-hoops and soap-boxes, and, besides,
there were cut flowers in extraordinary bouquets dec
orative erections that were certainly ingeniously and
fantastically contrived if they were not as beautiful as
the designers and constructors believed them to be.
A few steps farther on and you were among the fruits
and vegetables. Here was a great concourse of plates
with fine apples, pears, peaches, or quinces on each.
Then there were grapes, plums, strings of onions,
heaps of beets, carrots, cabbages, and such things, and
a squash calculated to make one gape with wonder at
its immensity. Next in order was an exhibit of butter
and of cheeses, the latter brown and wrinkled and rather
unattractive outwardly, yet at the same time suggestive
of a certain ripeness and inner richness. There were
pickles and cans of preserves and loaves of bread, all
hopeful of prize honors ; and, set against the windows
to show their color and translucence, were bottles of
maple syrup and tumblers of jelly.
The display in the lower room of the hall was dis
tinctively of the fields and kitchen, while that of the
room upstairs was as decidedly an exhibition of the
arts of the sitting room and parlor. The array of
fancy work was such as might rival the show-window
of a dry-goods store. Every inch of space on the long
tables was full, and many articles were tacked up on
the walls or draped over lines as if hung up to dry
indoors .after a rainy Monday s wash. Patchwork
296 New England and its Neighbors
quilts were favorites for demonstrating a woman s
prowess with the needle and taste in making com
binations. Some of them contained so vast a number
of tiny pieces it made one weary just to look at them
and think of the labor involved. Yet therein lay their
merit. Such a quilt is a monument to the patience
and skilful industry of the maker, and as such will be
a source of pleasure to her as long as she lives. Quite
likely it may be laid away as too good for common
use and be handed down in the family as an heirloom.
Besides its other excellences it has the virtue of being
a record of feminine garments worn by the family and
by the family friends everyday dresses, wedding
dresses, baby dresses. The whole gamut of human
life is pictured in the texture of the coverlet, and the
constructor can probably recognize and give some
thing of the history of each dress and person there
represented.
Other favorite articles shown at the cattle show were
elaborate rag rugs, sofa pillows, home-knit mittens
and stockings, worsted slippers, delicate doilies, and
quantities of crocheting. " Mary Stevens done that,"
said a woman, picking up some of the most intricate
of the embroidery and calling her husband s attention
to it. " Ain t it remarkable how she can do such a
lot with her needle, and she a cripple that can t put
her hand up to her head, and not even feed herself!"
I thought the needlework showed a distinct love of
The Autumn Cattle Show 297
color and prettiness quite independent of utility and
fitness ; for certainly a good deal of it would be hope
lessly out of harmony in the average home. A more
satisfactory phase of the exhibit was the housewifely
thrift that was apparent in discovering possibilities in
odds and ends of waste. Here was the old wearing
apparel rejuvenated in the form of rag carpets, rugs,
sofa pillows, etc., but the climax in this transformation
of household debris was reached in a pretty vase that
had acorns, suspender buttons, nails, iron nuts, and
other hardware stuck into its yielding surface, and then
the whole had been gilded. It was an ingenious use
of rubbish, but the result looked like the product of
some heathen nation of Africa or South America.
Art pure and simple was represented by a number
of hand-painted plates and silk banners and several
pictures in oils, water-colors, and pastel. The subjects
which the artists chose to depict were usually either
flowers or impossibly romantic landscapes. But,
though the pictures received their due share of ad
miration, they did not stir the hearts of most as did
the long-houred intricacy of the fancy needlework.
One corner of the upper hall was reserved for a
children s department, and here was a six-year-old s
loaf of bread occupying a place of honor amid a whole
table full of cookery and canned fruits and jellies and
pickles, the handiwork of other housekeepers of ten
der years. The children showed, too, a collection of
298 New England and its Neighbors
small hens eggs, several plates of fruit, some very
big cucumbers and some very little pumpkins, and
there were exhibited many child efforts at patchwork,
splashers, cushions, and a variety of pufferies and vani
ties in the needlework line, for which my vocabulary
has no names. The shining light among the boy
exhibitors was one who showed sixty different kinds
of beans of his own raising. If he did not get a half-
dollar prize, I do not think the judges did their duty.
The prize committees I saw at work had the air of
feeling a due sense of their responsibility, and I sup
pose they worried out their decisions as fairly as they
could, though these were sure to be regarded with
critical dissent by the owners of the goods that did not
find favor in their eyes. Still, the distinction of being
one of the judges to some degree compensated for the
grumbling of the dissatisfied and, besides, the com
mittees felt at liberty to sample freely the more tooth
some things that fell under their judicial care, so that
in certain cases the things judged well-nigh disappeared
in the process of having their comparative merits settled.
The exercises on the race-course began at eleven
o clock with a " Grand Cavalcade of Oxen." Oxen
have largely given way to horses on the New England
farms, but there are still plenty of them among the
hills, and the cavalcade was impressively long and slow
and sedate, except for a couple of little steers at the
end of the procession who did not agree with the boy
The Autumn Cattle Show
299
in charge of them as to where and how they should go.
They kept the lad in turmoil all through the march,,
and put him to shame before the multitude. A touch
of humor was given to the sober trail of the oxen by
a long-legged farmer who rode astride of one of the
creatures. Another man, known to every one as
" Cephas/ furnished merriment by riding in one of
the ox-carts and playing a little organ with a crank.
As Cephas was rigged up like a true clown in an out
landish costume of all the colors of the rainbow, this
was a very popular feature of the parade.
**> . *a*t<*<s<i ,^..i<- jiitt* ] 1 >, . , L?, *i_u.is ? 2JKS^H
The Cavalcade of Oxen
By the time the cavalcade of oxen had gone the
rounds it was noon, and thought turned dinnerward.
Some resorted to the eating tents, but the large major
ity went to their wagons and resurrected from under
the seats various boxes, baskets, tin cans, and bottles,
300 New England and its Neighbors
and made preparations for an open-air feast. The
food was generous in quantity, and it had a holiday
flavor in that there was coffee for children and all, and
the cake had frosting on it. To be sure the coffee
was cold, and one drinking cup did for several of the
picnickers, and the pie had caved in, but accidents and
shortcomings are null and void on such an occasion.
Often relatives who lived in different parts of the
home town or the county got together for dinner and
the victuals of both parties were passed about indis
criminately. This added to the interest, especially to
the investigating minds of the children. Even the
grown people showed a joking preference for a change
from the home cooking.
Immediately after dinner the folk began to resort
to the "grand stand." This was just across the track
from the judges two-story pagoda, whence these digni
taries viewed the races. The only thing grand about
the stand was its name, for it was nothing but a few
lines of unplaned plank seats terraced up a hillside.
The seats were soon filled, and the overflow accommo
dated themselves on neighboring stones and hillocks.
An old gentleman with a blue sash over his shoulder
was cantering up and down on a big black horse, trying
to keep the crowd off the race-course. This man was
the marshal. "All go across that want tew," he would
call out, " but we can t have yew blocking the track."
He and two young fellows who assisted him made
The Autumn Cattle Show
301
feints of riding down the crowd, but with all their
efforts they could not keep the course clear. Several
pairs of oxen were making ready to draw a load of
stone on a stone-boat, and the crowd was bound to get
close up, even if they stopped the whole performance.
On the Grounds
In this they displayed their Yankee independence,
or, to use a term that more exactly describes it, their
Yankee hoggishness. The men who were the most
obstreperous were those who had been drinking. It
was a no-license region, but it was not wholly parched
for all that, and rumor said you could get " crab-apple
bitters" right on the grounds. There was one man
302 New England and its Neighbors
in particular whose uncertain step and swaggering
manner and sense of importance showed that he had
found recent inspiration to great deeds in the bottle.
He would obey no orders, and once when an official s
horse crowded on him he caught its bridle and called
the rider a hard name. This rider had red hair, and
therefore, in the popular estimation, a temper, and he
instantly responded by raising a little whip he carried
and striking the drunken man square in the face.
That made the latter furious, he dropped the bridle,
broke into oaths, and would have snatched the orderly
out of the saddle had not others restrained him.
Gradually he subsided, but for some minutes serious
fighting seemed immanent.
cc What an ugly craowd there is here ! " remarked
the man next to me. cc They re baon to git on the
track. Some one ought to send the band daown here
an let em blow them fellers aout !
" I wisht they d quit their foolin and begin," the
man continued, after a pause. "This stun I m settin
on ain t gettin any softer. If I don t bring a seat
with me tomorrer then I m a liar."
But now the oxen were drawing. They only dragged
the stone-boat a few feet, but it made the great creatures
pant and twist painfully. The contest was between
two yokes, and after the first had been successful in
its effort the second tried it. They, too, succeeded,
and then more stone was added. So the trials went
To Buy OR NOT TO Buy
The Autumn Cattle Show 303
on, and the stones were piled higher till one pair or
the other found the load beyond its strength to move.
It seemed like cruel work, yet the friend at my elbow,
regarding the final struggles of the champions, imper-
turbably said, " They handle it pretty good naow, but
I don t see haow any farmer can work with cattle
they re so blame slow. We ain t had none on our
place sence I was a boy."
Some of the oxen were presently attached to carts
and driven about to show their training, and one of
the drivers got up in his cart and invited the
lookers-on to ride with him. " Don t stan there
star-gazin ," he called out, "when you got a chance
to ride with a good-lookin man." So a dozen chaffing
young fellows clambered into the cart and sat around
on the edges, and took a turn or two up and down the
track.
Later in the afternoon there was an exhibition of
horses and colts, and the day ended with a bicycle
race.
The second day of the fair was distinguished from
the first by being called " the horse show." There
were frequent trotting matches on the race-course,
both morning and afternoon, and the crowd was even
larger than on the day previous. All the fakirs were
on hand, and the uniformed brass band furnished en-
livenment with its bursts of music. In short, there
was for the pleasure-seekers all the din and dust and
304 New England and its Neighbors
turmoil that contribute to make the occasion notable
and interesting in its strong contrast to the country
quiet and repose of the rest of the year.
The races were not professional, and were the more
attractive on that account. We were not watching a
contest between mere racing-machines, and every driver
and horse had a readily perceived character of their
own. The two races which overtopped all others in
the interest aroused were the two which were most
picturesque and amateurish. In the first a woman
drove in the class set down on the programme as
" Carriage Horses." She was a pleasing, modest-
looking little person, with a fur muffler about her
neck. The sympathies of the onlookers were hers
from the beginning, and she drove in such a steady,
determined way that, though her horse was not in first
it never made a break, and she did the neatest driving
of any of the contestants. Everybody cheered when
the judges fastened the blue card to her horse that
meant she had taken the first prize.
The other race was open only to lads under fifteen
and misses under twenty, and was designed more to
show the deftness and capacities of the drivers than
the mettle of their steeds. There were three entries, a
dark -haired girl, stout and tanned, her poverty evi
denced by a hat three or four years out of date ; a
light-haired girl much more ladyfied and smartly
dressed than the other; and a freckle-faced boy.
The Autumn Cattle Show 305
None of them had much to boast of in the way of
a horse, but as it was to be an exhibition of skill rather
than speed, the looks of the animals did not much
matter. They lined up before the judges stand, and
at a given signal they all jumped from their buggies,
hastily unhitched their horses and took off the har
nesses. - Then they as hastily restored the harnesses
and put the horses into the shafts again. All three
were nervous and excited, and their feelings were
shared to a considerable extent by the people intently
watching them.
Now the light-haired girl was through and leaped
into her buggy and was off. The boy was only an
instant behind, and it looked as if the dark-haired girl
who started last had no chance. Round the course
they went, and on the second circuit, which was the
final and decisive one, it was seen that the dark-haired
girl was gaining. Near the close she was about to
pass her rivals when they laid on their whips and their
steeds broke into a gallop and left her to come in
belated and alone. The judges had already descended
from their elevated stand to look into the manner in
which the three had accomplished their harnessing.
Only the dark-haired girl had done this perfectly.
The other two had slighted details in their haste, and
on the course they had not kept their horses in good
control. The first prize escaped them, and the light-
haired girl, who had felt sure of it and had decided
306 New England and its Neighbors
just how she would spend the money, wept with the
bitterness of the disappointment.
The crowds looking on at the races kept fluctuating
people were coming and people were going all the
time, for no one cared to spend a whole day on any
single feature of the fair, however fascinating. Every
body had brought a supply of spare cash, which must
be spent, and, particularly in the children s case, this
money burned in their pockets until it was gone.
There was some regret at parting with the last of it,
and yet a certain satisfaction in having the matter
settled and completed.
For the hungry there were dining tents set with
long tables, and having at the rear improvised open-
air kitchens. Eating resorts of a humbler sort were
the booths where you could get a quick lunch of rolls
and " Frankfort sausages Coney Island style," and
walk off with the repast in your hand. The " Coney
Island style " was always emphasized by the vendors,
and it was clear they thought it added vastly to the
attraction.
Then there were booths which made a specialty of
candies, fruits, and beautifully tinted cold drinks, set
forth seductively in large, clear glasses. Colored drinks
apparently sold better than uncolored. A man would
perhaps not pay any more for pink lemonade than for
plain, but he would buy it quicker and feel he was
getting more for his money.
The Autumn Cattle Show
37
Cooking Apparatus at the Rear of the Eating Tents
All the vendors were shouters and spared no effort
in vociferating the merits of their very desirable wares,
but the man who made the most noise was a whip
merchant. " He stood in the tail of his wagon with
his stock in trade in a rack at his side, while down
below was a post about which he was continually snap
ping the whips to show how good they were.
" There/ says he, " is a whip you couldn t buy in
the stores for less n a dollar and a quarter [snap, snap,
snap], and, gents, I m goin to let you have it for
seventy-five cents [snap, snap] . There s good timber
in that whip. See you can bend it like the old
Harry ! Seventy-five cents ! Gosh, it s terrible, cut-
308 New England and its Neighbors
tin the price that way, but I can t be here doin no th
in , so I offer inducements [snap, snap]. Grandpa
[pointing to an elderly man who is fumbling in his
trousers pocket], you re goin to take this whip, ain t
you ? "
The old man shakes his head, and instead of money
extracts a generous bandana handkerchief and blows
his nose. This was a disappointment to the whip
man, but he promptly took up the thread of his dis
course and said : " Well, boys, now I ll tell you what
I ll do. Here s a little red bird [picks up a whip with
a strip of red on the handle] and here s a little yellow
bird. Now I ll put them with the seventy-five center,
and one dollar takes em all."
So he keeps on till some one buys, and then he says
he will make up a lot of six. " Here they be," he
calls out. " No, there ain t but five ! I m gettin
cross-eyed so I can t count. Well, there s another.
Now I m goin to let you have the whole six for a
dollar. You can t afford to go out and cut a stick
when you c n buy em like that;" and, between his
eloquence and the merits (somewhat uncertain) of his
whips, he found purchasers in plenty.
There were several shooting galleries on the grounds,
and their popularity was attested by the constant pop
of rifles and by the ringing of bells which sounded
automatically whenever a bull s-eye was hit. A still
more popular amusement, and one that had an almost
THE POUNDING-MACHINE
The Autumn Cattle Show 309
uninterrupted run of custom, was a merry-go-round,
A hand-organ furnished music, and two stout, sweating
men provided power, and the little painted horses
spun around the circle very gayly.
Not far from the merry-go-round was a pounding-
machine. You gave a blow with a heavy wooden beetle,
and a marker slid up a tall pole to show the weight of
your stroke. "Well, well," shouts the fellow in
charge, " who s the next man ? Come, gents, try
your strength. Well, well, it s fun only costs you
half a dime, and you find out just how much the cor
rect weight of every blow is. Have a try, gents. You ll
be sorry if you don t. You ll go home and hear your
comrades tell what they can do, but you can t tell what
you can do without telling a lit. I d tell one hundred
lies for a nickel, but I don t believe you would."
One of the tents was a photograph gallery, where
you could get your tintype taken for twenty-five cents.
" Right this way," the rowdy-looking proprietor was
shouting from the door, "we re on earth big as life
and twice as natural."
His next neighbor was expatiating on the unparal
leled charms of " Conkey s Great Mechanical World
perfect working figures constantly in motion
free to all we don t ask for money just walk right
in, ladies and gentlemen, and pay ten cents when you
come out if you are satisfied if you are not satisfied
don t pay anything."
310 New England and its Neighbors
Such as succumbed to this enticement found that
the tent contained a platform on which were a number
of miniature buildings and people made to represent
a real village, while for a .background there was a
painted canvas depicting a fine assortment of blue
cliffs, waterfalls, green fields, villas, and distant towns.
But one s attention was chiefly absorbed by the busy
inhabitants of the hamlet. They seemed rather rheu
matic and stiff" in the joints, yet there was not a single
idler in the whole lot. The chief mansion of the place
was undergoing repairs, and a Lilliputian man sat on
the peak of the roof shingling, a mason was everlast
ingly putting the final bricks on the chimney, and a
painter was at work on a balcony. In the yard below
was a man mixing mortar, and three carpenters at a
bench were nailing, sawing, and planing. A woman
churning on the piazza and another woman at the well
drawing water represented the domestic side of the.
home. In other parts of the village were a black
smith s shop, before which a horse was being shod, a
sawmill going full blast, and a railroad station with the
officials all attending to business. Every thirty sec
onds a train rushed through the hamlet. It came from
a hole at the left and disappeared into a hole at the
right, labelled " Hoosac Tunnel." I paid ten cents
when I went out.
Another chance for amusement was furnished by a
man with a blacked face and clothing stuffed out
The Autumn Cattle Show 311
ponderously with hay. He stood at the farther end
of a little fenced-off space, and let any man throw three
balls at him who would pay five cents for the privilege.
If you hit him, you could have a cigar.
One booth that was much patronized was known as
the "fish-pond." In its open front was set a shallow
tank of water, wherein were floating many little slips
of wood, or "fish," each bearing a concealed number.
On the walls of the booth were all the articles it was
possible to draw numbered to correspond with the fish
in the tank and there, were no blanks, the proprie
tor said. Every one got his money s worth and you
might draw the grand prize a pistol or a gold watch.
Most of the articles were valueless trinkets, but among
the rest hung the pistol and the gold watch, with
naught between you and possession save a lucky ten-
cent piece, and many a dime was staked fruitlessly on
the will-o -the-wisp chance.
All things have an end, and cattle show is no excep
tion. As the afternoon of the second day waned and
the exercises on the race-course were drawing to a close
a growing restiveness was manifest in the crowd. The
chill of the autumn evening was coming on and dis
persion began about four o clock. The vendors of
perishable fruits and eatables dropped their prices, and
the work of taking down the tents and booths and
packing up commenced, a tinge of forlornness and des
olation crept into the scene and the fun was over. Peo-
312 New England and its Neighbors
pie were in a hurry to depart, yet they were not in such
haste as to neglect to drive around the race-course before
they went out the gate. This spin on the track adds
a final touch of completeness to the occasion, as no
man who has any pride in his team neglects to make
the circuit at least once.
So ends the cattle show, though its memories with
the meeting of friends, the excitement, the half-dozen
whips for a dollar, the many circulars gathered free, and
a colored advertising yardstick, not to mention the chil
dren s catbags, last a long way toward the fair of next
year.
Five Cents a Throw at the Dolls
XIV
CAPE COD FOLKS
A Village Sign
i
"T was densely dark when
I arrived at Yarmouth
one October evening.
Viewed from the platform
of the railway station the
world about was a void of
inky gloom.
" if you re lookin for the
town/ said a man at rny
elbow, "you ll find it over
in that direction;" and he
pointed with his finger.
" You follow the road and
turn to the right when you ve
gone half a mile or so, and
that ll take you straight into
the village."
" But I don t see any
road," said I.
" Well, it goes around the
corner of that little shed over thar that the light from
the depot shines on."
313
314 New England and its Neighbors
cc And how far is it to a hotel ? "
" We ain t got no hotel in this place ; but Mr. Sut-
ton, two houses beyond the post-office, he keeps peo
ple, and I guess he ll take you in all right."
I trudged off along the vague highway, and at length
reached the town street, a narrow thoroughfare solidly
overarched by trees. Dwellings were numerous on
either side, and lights glowed through curtained win
dows. How snug those silent houses looked; and
how cheerless seemed the outer darkness and the
empty street to the homeless stranger ! I lost no
time in hunting up Mr. Button s, and the shelter he
granted brought a very welcome sense of relief.
When I explored Yarmouth the next day I found
it the most attenuated town I had ever seen. The
houses nearly all elbowed each other for a distance of
two or three miles close along a single slender roadway.
Very few dwellings ventured aside from this double
column. Apparently no other situation was orthodox,
and I suppose the familes which lived off from this one
street must have sacrificed their social standing in so
doing.
Yarmouth was settled in 1639 and is the oldest
town on the Cape. Its inhabitants in the past have
been famous seafaring folk, and fifty years ago almost
every other house was the domicile of a retired sea-
captain, and in the days of the sailing vessels the Yar
mouth men voyaged the world over. A certain class
Cape Cod Folks 315
of them went before the mast, but the majority were
ship s officers. A goodly number of the latter amassed
wealth in the India and China trade. This wealth has
descended in many instances still intact to the genera
tion of to-day, and accounts for the town s air of easy
going comfort. Fortunes, however, are no more drawn
from the old source, and at present the ambitious youth
who aspires to riches turns his eyes cityward. The sea
has ceased to promise a bonanza. Even the local fish
ing industry is wholly dead, though it is only a few
decades since the town had quite a mackerel fleet ; but
the little craft are all gone now, and nothing remains
of the old wharves save some straggling lines of black
and broken piles reaching out across the broad marshes
that lie between the long street and the salt water.
These marshes are of rather more economic impor
tance to modern Yarmouth than the sea itself; for
grass and rank sedges cover them and furnish a con
siderable proportion of the hay that is harvested. I
liked to loiter on their wet levels and watch the men
swing their scythes. I noticed that they left un
touched the coarse grass that grew on the strips of
sand. " That s beach grass," said one of the mowers
with whom I talked. " The stock won t eat that, nor
any other creatures won t eat it that I know of except
skunks. Thar s plenty of them chaps along the
shore on these ma shes, and me V my dog kitch a lot
of em here every winter."
New England and its Neighbors
The route back to the town from the marsh on
which this skunk hunter was at work led across a low
ridge of stony pasture-land where the blackberry vines
displayed their ruddy autumn foliage and brightened
the earth like flashes of flame. A most beautiful little
lane threaded along the crest of the ridge. It was only
Anchoring his Haystacks
about a dozen feet broad and was hemmed in by stone
walls overgrown with bushes, among which rose an
occasional tree. The paths trodden by the cows hoofs
in the turf of the lane wandered irregularly along, avoid
ing obstructions, and, as a rule, following the line of
the least resistance. There was, however, now and
Cape Cod Folks 317
then, a deflection, which the cattle had made pur
posely toward the thickest of the bordering brush,
intent on crowding up against the twigs to rid them
selves of flies. How shadowy and protected and pas
toral the lane was ! I envied the boys who drove the
^ows and thus had the chances to make a daily renewed
acquaintance with its arboreal seclusion.
Not far from where the lane emerged on the village
street stood a dwelling that I looked at with interest
every time I passed. It was a low and primitive struc
ture, and behind it was a little barn surmounted by
a swordfish weather vane. Swordfish or ships, I
observed, were the favorite vanes everywhere for Cape
Cod outbuildings. The attraction of this home, with
its curious air of repose under the shadowing trees,
grew until one day I ventured into the yard. Near
the barn a gray-bearded ancient had just hitched a
venerable horse into a wagon, and was preparing to
grease the vehicle s wheels. I spoke with him, and
after some preliminaries said, " It appears to me you
have about the oldest house in town."
He gave me a sudden look of surprise out of the
corner of his eyes, the purport of which I did not at
the moment understand, and then went on with his
work. "Ye-ye-yes," he replied, in" his hasty, stam
mering way ; for his thoughts seemed to start ahead of
his tongue and the latter gained control with difficulty.
" Ye-ye-yes, he is old, but he s a good hoss yit ! "
318 New England and its Neighbors
" Oh, I didn t say horse/ I remarked quickly. " I
was speaking of your house."
" My h-h-h-h-house, hm-m-m ! That that s one
of the old settlers. Must be two hundred year old ;
and do you see that pear tree thar with the piece of
zinc nailed over the bad place in the trunk, and the
iron bands around up where the branches begin, so t
they won t split off? I s pose that pear tree s as old
as the house."
"What kind is it?"
" It-it-it-it s wha-what we call the old-fashioned
button pear. Uncle Peter Thacher that had this
place years ago used to pick up the pears and sell
em 1 to the boys for a cent apiece. They ain t much
larger n wa nuts. They re kind of a mealy kind of
a pear, you know very good when they first drop
off, but they rot pretty quick."
The man had finished applying the wheel grease
now, and he clambered into the wagon and drove off,
while I walked on. I passed entirely through the
village into a half-wild region beyond, where much
of the land was covered by a dense pine wood. There
were occasional farm clearings ; but I noticed that the
houses of this outlying district were generally vacant.
Opposite one of the deserted homes was a corn-field
that attracted my attention because the tops of the
corn stalks had been cut off and carted away, and the
ears left on the stubs to ripen. This was a common
Cape Cod Folks
319
An Autumn Corn-field
The tops of the stalks have been cut off for fodder
way of treating corn years ago, but is seldom seen
now. Here and there in the field were scarecrows
sometimes an old coat and hat hoisted on a stake ;
sometimes a pole with a fluttering rag at the top, and,
320 New England and its Neighbors
suspended a little lower down on the same pole, a
couple of rusty tin cans that rattled together dubiously
in the breeze. As I was leaning over the roadside
wall contemplating this corn-field a man came along
and accosted me, and I improved the opportunity to
ask him why so many of the houses of the neighbor
hood were unoccupied.
"Wai," said he, "people don t like to live outside
o the villages nowadays. Sence the fishin give out,
the young folks all go off to get work, and they settle
somewhar else, and the old folks move into the towns.
In this house across the road, though, an old woman
lived, and she died thar two years ago. She was kind
o queer, and some say she wa n t a woman at all.
She wore women s clothes, but she had a beard and
shaved every mornin*, and her hair was cut short, and
she carried on the farm and did the work just like a
man."
My acquaintance spit meditatively and then inquired,
" Have you seen Hog Island? "
"No," I responded.
"You d ought to. It ain t fur from tother end of
Yarmouth village. You go down the lane along the
crick thar and ask the way of Jimmy Holton that
lives by the bridge. He ll tell you. It ain t really
an island, but a bunch o trees in a little ma sh, and
they grow so t if you see em from the right place
they look just like a hog snout, tail, and all."
Cape Cod Folks
321
The man had in his hand a large scoop with a row
of long wooden teeth projecting from its base. This
is the kind of implement
used in gathering most of
the Cape Cod cranberries.,
and the man was on his
way to a berry patch he
cultivated in a boggy hol
low, not far distant. I ac
companied him and found
his wife and children on
their knees, each armed
with a scoop with which
they were industriously
scratching through the
low mat of vines. Where
they had not yet picked,
the little vines were
twinkled all over with ripe
berries genuine autumn
fruit, waxen-skinned, rud-
dy-hued, and acid to the
tongue as if the atmos
pheric tartness and cool-
A Cranberry Picker
ness had helped the sun
to dye and flavor them.
The bog was not at all wild. In preparing it for
cranberry culture, it had been thoroughly tamed.
322 New England and its Neighbors
Brush and stumps had been cleared off and the turf
removed. Then it had been levelled and coated with
a layer of sand. It was encompassed and more or less
cut across by ditches ; and, in the process of clearing,
steep banks had been heaved up around the borders.
Harvest on a Cranberry Bog
" Cranberries are a great thing for the Cape," said
my friend. "They re the best crop we have, but it s
only late years we ve gone into em. When I was a
boy, the only cranberries we used to have was a little
sort that growed in the bogs wild ; and we never
thought nothin o dreanin the ma shes and goin into
the business the way we do now.
" My bog ain t fust class. A man s got to put a
Cape Cod Folks 323
lot o work into raisin cranberries to do the thing just
right, and when you only got a small bog you kind o
neglectify it. There s one bog about a mile from here
that s got sixteen acres in it, and they re always tendin
to it in one way and another the year around. They
keep it clear of weeds, and if there s any sign of fire
bug they steep tobacco and spray the vines. If there s
a dry spell they rise the water, though that don t do
as much good as it might. You c n water a plant all
you want to, but waterin won t take the place 6 Tain.
" Pretty soon after we finish pickin we flood the
bogs and they stay flooded all winter, if the mushrats
don t dig through the banks. The water keeps the
plants from freezin and seems to kind o fertilize them
at the same time. * The ponds make grand skatin
places. They freeze over solid* no weak spots
and they ain t deep enough to be dangerous, even if
you was to break through."
This man s statement as to the importance of cran
berry culture to the dwellers on the Cape was in nowise
exaggerated. When I continued my journeyings later
to the far end of the peninsula I saw reclaimed berry
bogs innumerable. There was scarcely a swampy
depression anywhere but that had been ditched and
diked and the body of it laid off as smooth as a floor
and planted to cranberries. The pickers were hard at
work only two or three of them on some bogs, on
others a motley score or more. It seemed as if the
324 New England and its Neighbors
task engaged the entire population irrespective of age
and sex ; and the picking scenes were greatly bright
ened by the presence of the women in their calico
gowns and sunbonnets or broad-brimmed straw hats.
Often the bogs were far enough from home, so that
the workers carried their dinners and made the labor
an all-day picnic, though I thought the crouching posi
tion must grow rather wearisome after a time.
Aside from the fertile and productive bogs the aspect
of the Cape was apt to be monotonous and sombre.
The cultivated fields appeared meagre and unthrifty,
the pastures were thin-grassed and growing up to
brush, and, more predominant than anything else in
the landscape, were the great tracts of scrubby wood
land, covered with dwarfed pines and oaks, often fire-
ravaged, and never a tree in them of respectable size.
Ponds and lakes were frequent. So were the inlets
from the sea with their borderings of salt marsh ;
indeed, the raggedness of the shore line was sugges
tive of a constant struggle between the ocean and the
continent for the possession of this slender outreach of
the New England coast. The buffeting of the fierce
sea winds was evident in the upheave of the sand dunes
and the landward tilt of the exposed trees trees that
had a very human look of fear, and seemed to be trying
to flee from the persecuting gales, but to be retarded
by laggard feet.
At the jumping-off tip of the Cape is Provincetown,
IN PROVINCETOWN
Cape Cod Folks 325
snugged along the shore, with steep protecting hills at
its back. It is a town that has an ancient old-world
look due to its narrow streets, with houses and stores
and little shops crowded close along the walks. It is
a fishy place, odorous of the sea, and the waterside is
lined with gray fish-shanties and storehouses. Many
spindle-legged wharves reach out across the beach, and
there are dories and small sailing-craft in and about
the harbor, and always a number of schooners, and
occasionally a larger vessel.
The inhabitants love the sea or else are involun
tarily fascinated by it. They delight to loiter on the
wharves and beach, and to sit and look out on old
ocean s wrinkled surface and contemplate its hazy
mystery. One would fancy they thought it replete
with beneficent possibilities, and that they were willing
lingerers dreamily expecting something fortunate or
fateful would heave into view from beyond the dim
horizon. The children seek the beach as assiduously
as their elders. It is their playground, their news
paper. They poke about the wharves strewn with
barrels and boxes, spars, chains, ropes, anchors, etc. ;
they find treasures in the litter that gathers on the
sands ; they dig clams on the mud-flats ; they race and
tumble, and they learn all that is going on in the
shipping.
The most exciting event while I was in town was
an unexpected catch of squids in the harbor. Squids
326 New England and its Neighbors
are the favorite bait of the cod fishermen, but at
Provincetown- there is rarely a chance to get this
bait so late in the year. The squids sought the
deepest portion of the bay, and a little fleet of small
boats collected above and captured them by the barrel-
ful. One midday I stood watching the boats from
a wharf. Two men who had come onto the wharf
soon after I did were regarding the scene from near
by. " It s queer how them squids hang in that deep
hole thar," said one of the men.
" They bring a good price for cod bait, I believe,"
said I.
" Yes, Willie Scott, that lives next door to me, he
made seven dollars this morning and has gone out
ag in. I ll bet his eyes are full of squid juice this
minute. The squids don t trouble much that way,
but they ll flip up a smeller (that s what we call their
arms) and give you a dose once in a while, spite of all
you can do. It makes your eyes sting, but the sting
don t last long."
" How large are these squids ? " I asked.
"Oh, they re small not much more n a foot and
a half, smellers and all."
The other man now spoke. He was short and
dark, had rings in his ears, and his accent was de
cidedly foreign. " Cap n Benson," said he, to his
companion, " I seen the butt end of a squid smeller
big as this barrel what I m^settin on."
Cape Cod Folks 327
Cap n Benson puffed a few times judiciously at his
pipe. "Yes," 1 he acknowledged presently, "there s a
good many kinds of squids, and they do kitch em
large enough so one ll last a cod schooner for bait a
whole v yage. We only get a little kind here."
Looking over the Cod Lines
The wharf we were on was nearly covered with
racks on which a great quantity of salted codfish had
been spread to dry, and Cap n Benson informed me
there was plenty more fish awaiting curing in the hold
of a slender-masted vessel that lay alongside the wharf.
"She s a Grand-Banker this schooner is that
brought these fish/ he continued. "We ain t got
but six Grand-Bankers now, and only fifteen fresh
328 New England and its Neighbors
fishermen. The fresh fishermen, you know, don t
go farther n the Georges and the West Banks. Forty
years ago we had two hundred fishing schooners owned
here, and we had sixty-seven whale ships where now
we got only three. Provincetown is- played out.
This mornin me and this man with me didn t have
but one hour s work, and we won t have over two
hours this afternoon. How you goin to make a
livin at twenty cents an hour with things goin on
that way ? Forty years ago you couldn t get enough
men at three dollars and a half a day."
The man with the ear-rings had picked up a piece of
shell and was attempting to drop it from the height
of his shoulder through a crack in the wharf. He
failed to accomplish his purpose though he tried again
and again.
" Mr. Klunn, if you want to drop that shell through
thar, just mention the minister," advised Cap n Benson.
He had hardly spoken when Mr. Klunn let the
shell fall, and it slipped 1 straight through the crack.
" I godfrey ! " exclaimed the Cap n, " I did it for you.
I never known that to fail. When I been whaling,
and we was cutting up the whale, you couldn t some
times strike a j int. You d try and try and you couldn t
strike it, and then you d stop and say c Minister ! and
it was done already you d hit the j int right off."
" I seen a whale heave up a shark the half as big
as a dory," remarked Mr. Klunn, after a pause.
Cape Cod Folks 329
"To be sure," the Cap n commented. "How-
somever, there s people say a whale can t take in
no thin bigger n a man s hand; but my idea is that s
after he s been eatin and had all he wanted."
" By gosh ! a whale got a swallow so big enough, if
he hongry, he swallow a man easy," Mr. Klunn de
clared. " Some peoples ain t believe about Jonah, but
they believe if they seen as much whales that I have."
"I m thinkin about them squids," Cap n Benson
said, as he shook his pipe free from ashes and slipped
it into the pocket of his jacket. " I guess when the
tide comes in to-night, I ll haul out my boat and see
if I can t get some of em."
" I ain t had no boat since the big storm," observed
the man with ear-rings.
" What storm was that ? " I inquired.
" It was when the Portland went down, in Novem
ber, 1898," explained Cap n Benson. "We had an
awful time wharves smashed, boat-houses carried off,
and vessels wrecked. It begun to blow in the night.
Fust thing I knowed of, it was my chimley comin
down."
" I was sick that time," said the ear-ring man. " The
doctor had to give me murphine pills. I was in the
bed two, three days, and I lose one hundred and
eighty-seven dollar by the storm. You remember
that schooner, Cap n Benson, what the two old mens
was drownded on ? "
3JO New England and its Neighbors
"Oh, I remember washed overboard out here in
the harbor, and the wind took the schooner bang up
ag in a wharf, and the cap n, he made a jump and
landed all right, and he never stopped to look behind
to see what become of his vessel nor nobody. He
run up into the town and he took the next train for
California."
" Yas, that s true," Mr. Klunn affirmed.
Later, while stopping over night at a Truro farm
house, a few miles back on the Cape, I heard more of
the great storm. "Thar was three days of it," said
my landlady, "startin on Saturday. It thundered
and lightened on Sunday, and it snowed Monday.
Everythin that wa n t good V strong was blowed
down. It blowed the shed off the end of our house,
and it blowed a window in upstairs, and it blowed the
saddle boards off the roof and some o j the shingles.
We had the highest tide we ve ever had, and there
was places where the sea-water come across the roads.
Monday the bodies begun to be washed ashore from
the Portland, and they kep 1 comin in for two weeks."
Truro is a scattered little country place. Its homes
dot every protected hollow. The only buildings that
seemed independent of the smiting of the winter blasts
were the town hall and the Baptist, Methodist, and
Catholic churches. These stood in a group on the
barest, bleakest hilltop. The churchyards were thick
set with graves, and among the stones grew little tan-
AN OLD WHARF
Cape Cod Folks
33*
gles of sumachs and other bushes, but the sandy height
had not a single tree.
On this hill, years ago, stood still another public
institution a windmill. <c It sot high up thar, so t
r - - ;. :i " ;
wwir ...... ....... .....
Public Buildings on the Hilltop
it was in sight all over town/ 7 said my landlady. "You
could see the miller puttin the sails on the arms, and
then when they got to turnin we d know which way
the wind blowed. But some days there wouldn t be
no wind, and the sails might hang there and not turn
the whole day long. We used to raise this yaller In
jun corn then, a good deal more n we do now on
the Cape, and we raised rye, and we d take the grain
to the windmill to grind. You can t buy no such corn
meal or rye meal now as we used to get from that old
mill. We e t hasty-pudding them days, and it used
332 New England and its Neighbors .
to be so nice ! and we had Johnny-cake, and hasty-
pudding bread that was made by putting some of the
hasty-pudding into flour and mixing em up into dough
together."
Of the churches on the hill the Catholic was the
newest. It was a little shed of a building with a gilt
cross surmounting the front gable. The attendants
were chiefly Portuguese, the nationality which at pres
ent constitutes the great majority of the coast fisher-
folk. Most of the fishing is done in rowboats, and
the fish are caught in nets fastened to lines of stakes
offshore. These fish-traps, as they are called, are
visited daily. The crew of a rowboat usually consists
of a " Cap n," who is pretty sure to be a Yankee, and
seven men who are likely to be all Portuguese. Truro
had four rowboats thus manned. They started out
at three in the morning and returned anywhere from
noon to eight in the evening.
" It s hard work," explained my landlady, " and the
Yankee men don t take up fishin , late years, the way
they did. I reckon they c n make more money farm-
in."
I wondered at this. The sandy soil did not look
productive, and yet the houses as a rule were painted
and in good repair, and conveyed a pleasing impres
sion of prosperity The people with whom I talked
seemed to be satisfied. "We git good crops," said
a farmer I questioned about agricultural affairs. " We
Cape Cod Folks
333
A Cape Cod Roadway
c n raise most all kinds o vegetables in the hollers,
and good grass, too, though our heaviest crops o
grass we git off n the ma shes. The cows like salt
hay fully as well as they do fresh hay, and they like
sedge best of all, because it s sweet; but you have to
be careful about feedin em too much of that or the
milk ll taste. Of course we got, plenty o pasture
on the higher ground and plenty o timber sich as tis.
The trees don t flourish, though, and you won t find
many that are much bigger n your leg. This is a
great country for wild berries blueberries, black
berries, and huckleberries. Our Portuguese here -
land ! they git half their livin in the woods. Besides
334 New England and its Neighbors
berries there s beach plums and wild cherries. But the
cherries we don t use for common eatin . We put
em up in molasses, and they kind o work and are
good to take for the stomach and the like o that."
I climbed over the hills round about Truro and
tramped the sandy, deeply rutted roads faithfully. It
was weary work to one used to solid earth. Such
lagging progress ! I could never get a good grip with
my feet, and slipped a little backward every time I
took a step forward. Except along the watercourses
nature s growths never attained the least exuberance.
The grass on the slopes and uplands was very thin,
and with the waning of the season much of it had
become wispy and withered. It was mingled with
goldenrod and asters that hugged the earth on such
short, stunted stems as to be hardly recognizable.
The landscape as viewed from a height had a curi
ously unstable look. Its form had not been moulded
by attrition, but the soil had been blown into vast
billows that had the appearance of a troubled sea
whose waves were on the point of advancing and over
whelming the habitations and all the green growing
things in the vales. Some of the dunes really do
advance, and the state has been obliged to make
appropriations and devise means for checking their
depredations. The work has chiefly been accom
plished with the aid of beach grass. This has an
affiliation for sand, and you can stick one of its coarse,
Cape Cod Folks
331
wiry tufts in anywhere and it will grow. It only needs
to be methodically planted, and the shifting dunes are
fast bound and the winds assail them in vain.
Some of the characteristics of this beach grass seemed
also to be characteristics of the people of the Cape.
They have the same 1 hardiness and endurance, and,
like the beach grass, have adapted themselves to their
environment and thrive where most would fail. With
its omnipresent sand and dwarf woods, the Cape, as I
saw it at the fag end of the year, appeared rather dreary,
bat the prosperous look of the homes was very cheer
ing. These are nearly all owned free from debt, and
that nightmare of the agriculturists in so many parts
of New England a mortgage is happily almost
unknown among the Cape Cod folks.
The Mowers on the Marshes
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