"Rainbow in the morning,Good sailors take warning,"
"Rainbow in the morning,Good sailors take warning,"
the old Squire remarked, smiling. "Better take your coats and umbrellas with you to-day."
We did not know then how many times during that day our thoughts would go back to the rainbow and the old superstition.
After breakfast we hitched up Old Sol, drove round by the Edwardses' to pick up Tom and Kate, and from there followed the lumber road into the great woods, to Otter Brook. The "burnt lots" were perhaps a mile beyond the brook.
Addison and I picked blackberries for a while with the others; then, watching our chance, we stole away and made for the ledges, a mile or two to the northeast.
I had managed to bring a drill hammer along in my basket, wrapped up in my jacket; and Addison had brought a short drill in his pocket. We found the ledge where Addison had made his discovery and had no great trouble in chipping off some specimens. I may add here that the specimens later proved to contain silver—in small quantities. I still have a few of them—mementos of youthful hopes that faded early in the light of greater knowledge.
We followed the ledges off to the northeast over several craggy hills. At one place we found many exfoliating lumps of mica; we cleaved out sheets of it nearly a foot square, which Addison believed might prove valuable for stove doors.
While pottering with the mica, I accidentally broke into a kind of cavity, or pocket, in the ledge, partly filled with disintegrated rock; and on clearing out the loose stuff from this pocket we came upon a beautiful three-sided crystal about two inches long, like a prism, green in color, except at one end, where it shaded to pink.
It was a tourmaline crystal, similar to certain fine ones that have been found some miles to the eastward, at the now world-famous Mount Mica. At that time we did not know what it was, but, thinking that it might be valuable, we searched the pocket for other crystals, but found no more.
We had both become so much interested in searching for minerals that we had quite forgotten our luncheon. The sky, I remember, was overcast and the sun obscured; it was also very smoky from forest fires, which in those days were nearly always burning somewhere to the north of us during the summer.
But presently, as Addison was thumping away with the hammer, I noticed that it was growing dark. At first I thought that it was merely a darker cloud above the smoke that had drifted over the sun, and said nothing; but the sky continued to darken, and soon Addison noticed it.
"Another shower coming, I guess," he said, looking up. "Don't see any particular clouds, though. I wonder what makes it so dark?"
"It seems just like night coming on," said I. "But it isn't so late as all that, is it?"
"No!" exclaimed Addison. "It isn't night yet, I know!" And he hastily took out Theodora's watch, which she had intrusted to him to carry that day, so that we should know when to start for home. "It's only half past three, and the sun doesn't set now till after seven o'clock."
We hammered at the ledge again for a while; but still it grew darker.
"Well, this beats me!" Addison exclaimed; and again he surveyed the sky.
"That watch hasn't stopped, has it?" I said; for night was plainly falling.
Addison hastily looked again.
"No, it's ticking all right," he said. "Theodora's watch never stops, you know." It was a fine watch that her father had left to her.
By that time it was so dark that we could hardly see the hands on the watch; and although the day had been warm, I noticed a distinct change in the temperature—a chill. Somewhere in the woods an owl began to hoot dismally, as owls do at night; and from a ledge a little distance from the one on which we stood a whippoorwill began to chant.
Night was evidently descending on the earth—at four o'clock of an August afternoon! We stared round and then looked at each other, bewildered.
"Addison, what do you make of this!" I cried.
Thoughts of that rainbow in the morning had flashed through my mind; and with it came a cold touch of superstitious fear, such as I had never felt in my life before. In that moment I realized what the fears of the ignorant must have been through all the past ages of the world. It is a fear that takes away your reason. I could have cried out, or run, or done any other foolish thing.
Without saying a word, Addison put the tourmaline crystal into his pocket and picked up the drill and the little bundle of silver-ore specimens, which to carry the more easily he had tied up in his handkerchief.
"Come on," he said in a queer, low tone. "Let's go find Theodora and Nell. I guess we'd better go home—if it's coming on night in the middle of the afternoon."
He tried to laugh, for Addison had always prided himself on being free from all superstition. But I saw that he was startled; and he admitted afterwards that he, too, had remembered about that rainbow in the morning, and had also thought of the comet that had appeared a few years before and that many people believed to presage the end of the world.
We started to run back, but it had already grown so dark that we had to pay special heed to our steps. We could not walk fast. To this day I remember how strange and solemn the chanting of the whippoorwills and the hoarseskook! of the nighthawks sounded to me. No doubt I was frightened. It was exactly like evening; the same chill was in the air.
At last we reached the place where we had left the others, but they were not there. Addison called to Theodora and Ellen several times in low, suppressed tones; I, too, felt a great disinclination to shout or speak aloud.
"I guess they've all gone back where we left the wagon," Addison said at last.
We made our way through the tangled bushes, brush and woods, down to Otter Brook. In the darkness we went a little astray from the place where we had unharnessed the horse; but presently, as we were moving about in the brushwood, we heard a low voice say:
"Is that you, Ad?"
It was Theodora; and immediately we came upon them all, sitting together forlornly there in the wagon. They had hitched up Old Sol and were anxiously waiting for us in order to start for home. The strange phenomenon seemed to have dazed them; they sat there in the dark as silent as so many mice.
"Hello, girls!" Addison exclaimed. "Are you all there? Quite dark, isn't it?"
"Oh, Ad, what do you think this is?" Theodora asked, still in the same hushed voice.
"Well, I think it isdark," replied Addison, trying to appear unconcerned.
"Don't laugh, Ad," said Theodora solemnly. "Something awful has happened."
"And where have you two been so long?" asked Catherine. "We thought you were lost. We thought you would never come. What time is it?"
We struck a match and looked. It was nearly half past four.
"Oh, get in, Ad, and take the reins! Let's go home!" Ellen pleaded.
"Yes, Ad, let's go home, if we can get there," said Tom Edwards. "What d'ye suppose it is, anyhow?"
"Dark!" exclaimed Addison hardily. "Just plain dark!"
"Oh, Addison!" exclaimed Theodora reprovingly. "Don't try to joke about a thing like this."
"It may be the end of the world," Ellen murmured.
"The world has had a good many ends to it," said Addison. "Which end do you think this is, Nell?"
But neither Ellen nor Theodora cared to reply to him. Their low, frightened voices increased my uneasiness. I could think of nothing except that rainbow in the morning; "morning," "warning," seemed to ring in my ears.
We climbed into the wagon and started homeward, but it was so dark that we had to plod along slowly. Old Sol was unusually torpid, as if the ominous obscurity had dazed him, too. After a time he stopped short and snorted; we heard the brush crackle and caught a glimpse of a large animal crossing the road ahead of us.
"That's a bear," Thomas said. "Bears are out, just as if it were night."
Some minutes passed before we could make Old Sol go on; and again we heard owls hooting in the woods.
Long before we got down to the cleared land, however, the sky began gradually to grow lighter. We all noticed it, and a feeling of relief stole over us. In the course of twenty minutes it became so light that we could discern objects round us quite plainly. The night chill, too, seemed to go from the air.
Suddenly, as we rattled along, Addison jumped up from his seat and turned to us. "I know now what this is!" he cried. "Why didn't I think of it before?"
"What is it—if you know?" cried Catherine and Theodora at once.
"The eclipse! The total eclipse of the sun!" exclaimed Addison. "I remember now reading something about it in theMaine Farmera fortnight ago. It was to be on the 7th—and this is it!"
At that time advance notices of such phenomena were not so widely published as they are now; at the old farm, too, we did not take a daily newspaper. So one of the great astronomical events of the last century had come and gone, and we had not known what it was until it was over.
Except for the dun canopy of smoke and clouds over the sun we should have guessed at once, of course, the cause of the darkness; but as it was, the eclipse had given us an anxious afternoon; and although the rainbow in the morning had probably not the slightest connection with the eclipse,—indeed, could not have had,—it had greatly heightened the feeling of awe and superstitious dread with which we had beheld night fall in the middle of the afternoon!
By the time we got home it was light again. As we drove into the yard, the old Squire came out, smiling. "Was it a little dark up where you were blackberrying a while ago?" he asked.
"Well,justa little dark, sir," Addison replied, with a smile as droll as his own. "But I suppose it was all because of that rainbow in the morning that you told us to look out for."
A few evenings ago, I read in a Boston newspaper that, as the result of a close contest, Isaac Kane Woodbridge had been elected mayor of one of the largest and most progressive cities of the Northwest.
Little Ike Woodbridge! Yes, it was surely he. How strangely events work round in this world of ours! Memories of a strange adventure that befell him years ago when he was a little fellow came to my mind, and I thought of the slender thread by which his life hung that afternoon.
The selectmen of our town had taken Ike Woodbridge from the poor-house and "bound him out" to a farmer named Darius Dole. He was to have food, such as Dole and his wife ate, ten weeks' schooling a year, and if he did well and remained with the Doles until he was of legal age, a "liberty suit" of new clothes and fifty dollars.
That was the written agreement; and Farmer Dole, who was a severe, hard-working man, began early to see to it that little Ike earned all that came to him. The boy, who was a little over seven years old, had to be up and dressed at five o'clock in the morning, fetch wood and water to the kitchen, help do chores at the barn, run on errands, pull weeds in the garden, spread the hay swathes in the field with a little fork, and do a hundred other things, up to the full measure of his strength.
The neighbors soon began to say that little Ike was being worked too hard. When the old Squire was one of the selectmen, he remonstrated with Dole, and wrung a promise from him that the boy should have more hours for sleep, warmer clothes for winter, and three playdays a year; but Dole did not keep his promise very strictly.
The fall that little Ike was in his eighth year, the threshers, as we called the men who journeyed from farm to farm to thresh the grain, came to the old Squire's as usual. While my cousin Halstead was helping to tend the machine, he got a bit of wheat beard in his right eye.
First Theodora, then Addison, and finally the old Squire, tried to wipe it out of his eye with a silk handkerchief; but they could not get it out, and by the next morning Halstead was suffering so much that Addison went to summon Doctor Green from the village, six miles away. But the doctor had gone to Portland, and Addison came back without him. Meanwhile a neighbor, Mrs. Wilbur, suggested putting an eyestone into Halstead's eye to get out the irritating substance. Mrs. Wilbur told them that Prudent Bedell, a queer old fellow who lived at Lurvey's Mills, four miles away, had an eyestone that he would lend to any one for ten cents.
Bedell was generally known as "the old sin-smeller," because he pretended to be able, through his sense of smell, to detect a criminal. Indeed, the old Squire had once employed him to settle a dispute for some superstitious lumbermen at one of his logging camps.
Anxious to try anything that might relieve Halstead's suffering, the old Squire sent me to borrow the eyestone. Although I was fourteen, that was the first time I had ever heard of an eyestone; from what Mrs. Wilbur had said about it, I supposed that it was something very mysterious.
"It will creep all round, inside the lid of his eye," she had said, "and find the dirt, and draw it along to the outer corner and push it out."
Physicians and oculists still have some faith in eyestones, I believe, although, on account of the progress that has been made in methods of treating the eye, they are not as much in use as formerly. Most eyestones are a calcareous deposit, found in the shell of the common European crawfish. They are frequently pale yellow or light gray in color.
Usually you put the eyestone under the eyelid at the inner canthus of the eye, and the automatic action of the eye moves it slowly over the eyeball; thus it is likely to carry along with it any foreign body that has accidentally lodged in the eye. When the stone has reached the outer canthus you can remove it, along with any foreign substance it may have collected on its journey over the eye.
Halstead's sufferings had aroused my sympathy, and I set off at top speed; by running wherever the road was not uphill, I reached Lurvey's Mills in considerably less than an hour. Several mill hands were piling logs by the stream bank, and I stopped to inquire for Prudent Bedell. Resting on their peavies, the men glanced at me curiously.
"D'ye mean the old sin-smeller?" one of them asked me. "What is it you want?"
"I want to borrow his eyestone," I replied.
"Well," the man said, "he lives just across the bridge yonder, in that little green house."
It was a veritable bandbox of a house, boarded, battened, and painted bright green; the door was a vivid yellow. In response to my knock, a short, elderly man opened the door. His hair came to his shoulders; he wore a green coat and bright yellow trousers; and his arms were so long that his large brown hands hung down almost to his knees.
It was his nose, however, that especially caught my attention, for it was tipped back almost as if the end had been cut off. I am afraid I stared at him.
"And what does this little gentleman want?" he said in a soft, silky voice that filled me with fresh wonder.
I recalled my wits sufficiently to ask whether he had an eyestone, and if he had, whether he would lend it to us. Whereupon in the same soft voice he told me that he had the day before lent his eyestone to a man who lived a mile or more from the mills.
"You can have it if you will go and get it," he said.
I paid him the usual fee of ten cents, and turned to hasten away; but he called me back. "It must be refreshed," he said.
He gave me a little glass vial half full of some liquid and told me to drop the eyestone into it when I should get it. Before using the eyestone it should be warmed in warm water, he said; then it should be put very gently under the lid at the corner of the eye. The eye should be bandaged with a handkerchief; and it was very desirable, he said, to have the sufferer lie down, and if possible, go to sleep.
With those directions in mind, I hurried away in quest of the eyestone; but at the house of the man to whom Bedell had sent me I found that the eyestone had done its work and had already been lent to another afflicted household, a mile away, where a woman had a sty in her eye. At that place I overtook it.
The woman, whose sty had been cured, opened a drawer and took out the eyestone, carefully wrapped in a piece of linen cloth. She handled it gingerly, and as I gazed at the small gray piece of chalky secretion, something of her own awe of it communicated itself to me. We dropped it into the vial, to be "refreshed"; and then, buttoning it safe in the pocket of my coat, I set off for home. Since I was now two or three miles north of Lurvey's Mills, I took another and shorter road than that by which I had come.
As it chanced, that road took me by the Dole farm, where little Ike lived. I saw no one about the old, unpainted house or the long, weathered barn, which with its sheds stood alongside the road. But as I hurried by I heard some hogs making a great noise—apparently under the barn. They were grunting, squealing, and "barking" gruffly, as if they were angry.
As I stopped for an instant to listen, I heard a low, faint cry, almost a moan, which seemed to come from under the barn. It was so unmistakably a cry of distress that, in spite of my haste, I went up to the barn door. Again I heard above the roars of the hogs that pitiful cry. The great door of the barn stood partly open, and entering the dark, evil-smelling old building, I walked slowly along toward that end of it from which the sounds came.
Presently I came upon a rickety trapdoor, which opened into the hogpen; the cover of the trapdoor was turned askew and hung down into the dark hole. Beside the hole lay a heap of freshly pulled turnips, with the green tops still on them.
The hogs were making a terrible noise below, but above their squealing I heard those faint moans.
"Who's down there?" I called. "What's the matter?"
From the dark, foul hole there came up the plaintive voice of a child. "Oh, oh, take me out! The hogs are eating me up! They've bit me and bit me!"
It was little Ike. Dole and his wife, I learned later, had gone away for the day on a visit, and had left the boy alone to do the chores—among other things to feed the hogs at noon; but as Ike had tugged at the heavy trapdoor to raise it, he had slipped and fallen down through the hole.
The four gaunt, savage old hogs that were in the pen were hungry and fierce. Even a grown person would have been in danger from the beasts. The pen, too, was knee-deep in soft muck and was as dark as a dungeon. In his efforts to escape the hogs, the boy had wallowed round in the muck. The hole was out of his reach, and the sty was strongly planked up to the barn floor on all sides.
At last he had got hold of a dirty piece of broken board; backing into one corner of the pen, he had tried, as the hogs came "barking" up to him, to defend himself by striking them on their noses. They had bitten his arms and almost torn his clothes off him.
The little fellow had been in the pen for almost two hours, and plainly could not hold out much longer. Prompt action was necessary.
At first I was at a loss to know how to reach him. I was afraid of those hogs myself, and did not dare to climb down into the pen. I could see their ugly little eyes gleaming in the dark, as they roared up at me. At last I hit upon a plan. I threw the turnips down to them; then I got an axe from the woodshed, and hurried round by way of the cart door to the cellar. While the hogs were ravenously devouring the turnips, I chopped a hole in the side of the pen, through which I pulled out little Ike. He was a sorry sight. His thin little arms were bleeding where the hogs had bitten him, and he was so dirty that I could hardly recognize him. When I attempted to lead him out of the cellar, he tottered and fell repeatedly.
At last I got him round to the house door—only to find it locked. Dole and his wife had locked up the house and left little Ike's dinner—a piece of corn bread and some cheese—in a tin pail on the doorstep; the cat had already eaten most of it. I had intended to take him indoors and wash him, for he was in a wretched condition. Finally I put him on Dole's wheelbarrow, which I found by the door of the shed, and wheeled him to the nearest neighbors, the Frosts, who lived about a quarter of a mile away. Mrs. Frost had long been indignant as to the way the Doles were treating the boy; she gladly took him in and cared for him, while I hurried on with the eyestone.
I reached home about four o'clock in the afternoon, and the old Squire thought that, in view of my errand, I had been gone an unreasonably long time.
Halstead's eye was so much inflamed that we had no little trouble in getting the eyestone under the lid. Finally, however, the old Squire, with Addison's help, slipped it in. Halstead cried out, but the old Squire made him keep his eye closed; then the old gentleman bandaged it, and made him lie down.
But after all, I am unable to report definitely as to the efficacy of the eyestone, for shortly after five o'clock, when the stone had been in Halstead's eye a little more than an hour, Doctor Green came. He had returned on the afternoon train from Portland, and learning that we had sent for him earlier in the day, hurried out to the farm. When he examined Halstead's eye, he found the eyestone near the outer canthus, and near it the irritating bit of wheat beard. He removed both together. Whether or not the eyestone had started the piece of wheat beard moving toward the outer corner of the eye was doubtful; but Doctor Green said, laughingly, that we could give the good old panacea the benefit of the doubt.
It was not until we were at the supper table that evening—with Halstead sitting at his place, his eye still bandaged—that I found a chance to explain fully why I had been gone so long on my errand.
Theodora and grandmother actually shed tears over my account of poor little Ike. The old Squire was so indignant at the treatment the boy had received that he set off early the next morning to interview the selectmen. As a result, they took little Ike from the Doles and put him into another family, the Winslows, who were very kind to him. Mrs. Winslow, indeed, gave him a mother's care and affection.
The boy soon began to grow properly. Within a year you would hardly have recognized him as the pinched and skinny little fellow that once had lived at the Dole farm. He grew in mind as well as body, and before long showed so much promise that the Winslows sent him first to the village academy, and afterward to Westbrook Seminary, near Portland. When he was about twenty-one he went West as a teacher; and from that day on his career has been upward.
We were eating breakfast one morning late in August that summer when through an open window a queer, cracked voice addressed the old Squire:
"Don't want to disturb ye at your meals, Squire, but I've come over to see if I can't borry a boy to hark fer me."
It was old Hughy Glinds, who lived alone in a little cabin at the edge of the great woods, and who gained a livelihood by making baskets and snowshoes, lining bees and turning oxbows. In his younger days he had been a noted trapper, bear hunter and moose hunter, but now he was too infirm and rheumatic to take long tramps in the woods.
The old Squire went to the door. "Come in, Glinds," he said.
"No, Squire, I don't believe I will while ye're eatin'. I jest wanted to see if I could borry one of yer boys this forenoon. I've got a swarm of bees lined over to whar the old-growth woods begin, and if I'm to git 'em I've got to foller my line on amongst tall trees and knock; and lately, Squire, I'm gettin' so blamed deaf I snum I can't hear a bee buzz if he's right close to my head! So I come over to see if I could git a boy to go with me and hark when I knock on the trees."
"Why, yes, Glinds," said the old Squire, "one of the boys may go with you. That is, he may if he wants to," he added, turning to us.
Addison said that he had something else he wished to do that forenoon. Halstead and I both offered our services; but for some reason old Glinds decided that I had better go. Grandmother Ruth objected at first and went out to talk with the old fellow. "I'm afraid you'll let him get stung or let a tree fall on him!" she said.
Old Hughy tried to reassure her. "I'll be keerful of him, marm. I promise ye, marm, the boy shan't be hurt. I'm a-goin' to stifle them bees, marm, and pull out all their stingers." And the old man laughed uproariously.
Grandmother Ruth shook her head doubtfully; old Hughy's reputation for care and strict veracity was not of the best.
When I went to get ready for the jaunt grandmother charged me to be cautious and not to go into any dangerous places, and before I left the house she gave me a pair of gloves and an old green veil to protect my head.
Before starting for the woods we had to go to old Hughy's cabin to get two pails for carrying the honey and a kettle and a roll of brimstone for "stifling" the bees. As we passed the Murch farm the old man told me that he had tried to get Willis, who stood watching us in the dooryard, to go with him to listen for the bees. "But what do you think!" he exclaimed with assumed indignation. "That covetous little whelp wouldn't stir a step to help me unless I'd agree to give him half the honey! So I came to git you, for of course I knowed that as noble a boy as I've heered you be wouldn't act so pesky covetous as that."
Getting the tin pails, the kettle and the brimstone together with an axe and a compass at the old man's cabin, we went out across the fields and the pastures north of the Wilbur farm to the borders of the woods through which old Hughy wanted to follow the bees.
A line of stakes that old Hughy had set up across the open land marked the direction in which the bees had flown to the forest. After taking our bearings from them by compass we entered the woods and went on from one large tree to another. Now and again we came to an old tree that looked as if it were hollow near the top. On every such tree old Hughy knocked loudly with the axe, crying, "Hark, boy! Hark! D'ye hear 'em? D'ye see any come out up thar?" At times he drew forth his "specs" and, having adjusted them, peeped and peered upward. Like his ears, the old man's eyes were becoming too defective for bee hunting.
In that manner we went on for at least a mile, until at last we came to Swift Brook, a turbulent little stream in a deep, rocky gully. Our course led across the ravine, and while we were hunting for an easy place to descend I espied bees flying in and out of a woodpecker's hole far up toward the broken top of a partly decayed basswood tree.
"Here they are!" I shouted, much elated.
Old Hughy couldn't see them even with his glasses on, they were so high and looked so small. He knocked on the trunk of the tree, and when I told him that I could see bees pouring out and distinctly hear the hum of those in the tree he was satisfied that I had made no mistake.
When bee hunters trace a swarm to a high tree they usually fell the tree; to that task the old man and I now set ourselves. The basswood was fully three feet in diameter, and leaned slightly toward the brook. In spite of the slant, old Hughy thought that by proper cutting the tree could be made to fall on our side of the gully instead of across it. He threw off his old coat and set to work, but soon stopped short and began rubbing his shoulder and groaning, "Oh, my rheumatiz, my rheumatiz! O-o-oh, how it pains me!"
That may have been partly pretense, intended to make me take the axe; for he was a wily old fellow. However that may be, I took it and did a borrowed boy's best to cut the scarfs as he directed, but hardly succeeded. I toiled a long time and blistered my palms.
Basswood is not a hard wood, however, and at last the tree started to fall; but instead of coming down on our side of the gully it fell diagonally across it and crashed into the top of a great hemlock that stood near the stream below. The impact was so tremendous that many of the brittle branches of both trees were broken off. At first we thought that the basswood was going to break clear, but it finally hung precariously against the hemlock at a height of thirty feet or more above the bed of the brook. From the stump the long trunk extended out across the brook in a gentle, upward slant to the hemlock. The bees came out in force. Though in felling the tree I had disturbed them considerably, none of them had come down to sting us, but now they filled the air. Apparently the swarm was a large one.
Old Hughy was a good deal disappointed. "I snum, that 'ere's a bad mess," he grumbled.
At last he concluded that we should have to fell the hemlock. Judging from the ticklish way the basswood hung on it, the task looked dangerous. We climbed down into the gully, however, and, with many an apprehensive glance aloft where the top of the basswood hung threateningly over our heads, approached the foot of the hemlock and began to chop it. The bees immediately descended about our heads. Soon one of them stung old Hughy on the ear. We had to beat a retreat down the gully and wait for the enraged insects to go back into their nest.
The hole they went into was in plain sight and appeared to be the only entrance to the cavity in which they had stored their honey. It was a round hole and did not look more than two inches in diameter. While we waited for the bees to return to it old Hughy, still rubbing his sore ear, changed his plan of attack.
"We've got to shet the stingin' varmints in!" he exclaimed. "One of us has got to walk out with a plug, 'long that 'ere tree trunk, and stop 'em in."
We climbed back up the side of the gully to the stump of the basswood. There the old man, taking out his knife, whittled a plug and wrapped round it his old red handkerchief.
"Now this 'ere has got to be stuck in that thar hole," he said, glancing first along the log that projected out over the gully and then at me. "When I was a boy o' your age I'd wanted no better fun than to walk out on that log; but my old head is gittin' a leetle giddy. So I guess you'd better go and stick in this 'ere plug. A smart boy like you can do it jest as easy as not."
"But I am afraid the bees will sting me!" I objected.
"Oh, you can put on them gloves and tie that 'ere veil over your head," the old man said. "I'll tie it on fer ye."
I had misgivings, but, not liking to fail old Hughy at a pinch, I let him rig me up for the feat and at last, taking the plug, started to walk up the slightly inclined tree trunk to the woodpecker's hole, which was close to the point where the basswood rested against the hemlock. I found it was not hard to walk up the sloping trunk if I did not look down into the gully. With stray bees whizzing round me, I slowly took one step after another. Once, I felt the trunk settle slightly, and I almost decided to go back; but finally I went on and, reaching the hole, grasped a strong, green limb of the hemlock to steady myself. Then I inserted the plug, which fitted pretty well, and drove it in with the heel of my boot.
Perhaps it was the jar of the blow, perhaps it was my added weight, but almost instantly I felt the trunk slip again—and then down into the gully it went with a crash!
Luckily I still had hold of the hemlock limb and clung to it instinctively. For a moment I dangled there; then with a few convulsive efforts I succeeded in drawing myself to the trunk of the hemlock and getting my feet on a limb. Breathless, I now glanced downward and was terrified to see that in falling the basswood had carried away the lower branches of the hemlock and left no means of climbing down. If the trunk of the hemlock had been smaller I could have clasped my arms about it and slid down; but it was far too big round for that. In fact, to get down unassisted was impossible, and I was badly frightened. I suppose I was perched not more than thirty-five feet above the ground; but to me, glancing fearfully down on the rocks in the bed of the brook, the distance looked a hundred!
Moreover, the trunk of the basswood had split open when it struck, and all the bees were out. Clouds of them, rising as high as my legs, began paying their respects to me as the cause of their trouble. Luckily the veil kept them from my face and neck.
I could see old Hughy on the brink of the gully, staring across at me, open-mouthed, and in my alarm I called aloud to him to rescue me. He did not reply and seemed at a loss what to do.
I had started to climb higher into the shaggy top of the hemlock, to avoid the bees, when I heard some one call out, "Hello!" The voice sounded familiar and, glancing across the gully, I saw Willis Murch coming through the woods. Seeing us pass his house and knowing what we were in quest of, Willis, curious to know what success we would have, had followed us. He had lost track of us in the woods for a time, but had finally heard the basswood fall and then had found us.
Even at that distance across the gully I saw Willis's face break into a grin when he saw me perched in the hemlock. For the present, however, I was too much worried to be proud and implored his aid. He looked round a while, exchanged a few words with old Hughy and then hailed me.
"I guess we shall have to fell that hemlock to get you down," he shouted, laughing.
Naturally, I did not want that done.
"I shall have to go home for a long rope," he went on, becoming serious. "If we can get the end of a rope up there, you can tie it to a limb and then come down hand over hand. But I don't think our folks have a rope long enough; I may have to go round to the old Squire's for one."
Since old Hughy had no better plan to suggest, Willis set off on the run. As the distance was fully two miles, I had a long wait before me, and so I made myself as comfortable as I could on the limb and settled down to wait.
Old Hughy hobbled down into the gully with his kettle and tried to smother the bees by putting the brimstone close to the cleft in the tree trunk and setting it afire; but, although the fumes rose so pungently that I was obliged to hold my nose to keep from being smothered, the effect on the bees was not noticeable. Old Hughy then tried throwing water on them. The water was more efficacious than the brimstone, and before Willis returned the old man was able to cut out a section of the tree trunk and fill his two pails with the dripping combs—all of which I viewed not any too happily from aloft.
Willis appeared at last with the coil of rope. With him came Addison and Halstead, much out of breath, and a few minutes later the old Squire himself arrived. They said that grandmother Ruth also was on the way. Willis, it seems, had spread alarming reports of my predicament.
Willis and Addison tied numerous knots in the rope so that it should not slip through my hands and knotted a flat stone into the end of it. Then they took turns in throwing it up toward me until at length I caught it and tied it firmly to the limb on which I was sitting. Then I ventured to trust my weight to it and amid much laughter but without any difficulty lowered myself to the ground.
In fact, I was not exactly the hero. The hero, I think, was Willis. But for his appearance I hardly know how I should have fared.
Old Hughy, I remember, was rather loath to share the honey with us; but we all took enough to satisfy us. The old man, indeed, was hardly the hero of the occasion either—a fact that he became aware of when on our way home we met grandmother Ruth, anxious and red in the face from her long walk. She expressed herself to him with great frankness. "Didn't you promise to be careful where you sent that boy!" she exclaimed. "Hugh Glinds, you are a palavering old humbug!"
Old Hughy had little enough to say; but he tried to smooth matters over by offering her a piece of honey-comb.
"No, sir," said she. "I want none of your honey!"
All that the old Squire had said when he saw me up in the hemlock was, "Be calm, my son; you will get down safe." And when they threw the rope up to me he added, "Now, first tie a square knot and then take good hold of the rope with both hands."
At daybreak on September 26, if I remember aright, we started to drive from the old farm to Portland with eighteen live hogs. There was a crisp frost that morning, so white that till the sun rose you might have thought there had been a slight fall of snow in the night.
We put eight of the largest hogs into one long farm wagon with high sideboards, drawn by a span of Percheron work horses, which I drove; the ten smaller hogs we put into another wagon that Willis Murch drove. By making an early start we hoped to cover forty miles of our journey before sundown, pass the night at a tavern in the town of Gray where the old Squire was acquainted, and reach Portland the next noon. Since we wished to avoid unloading the hogs, we took dry corn and troughs for feeding them in the wagons and buckets for fetching water to them. The old Squire went along with us for the first fifteen miles to see us well on our way, then left us and walked to a railroad station a mile or two off the wagon road, where he took the morning train into Portland, in order to make arrangements for marketing the hogs.
Everything went well during the morning, although the hogs diffused a bad odor along the highway. Toward noon we stopped by the wayside, near the Upper Village of the New Gloucester Shakers, to rest and feed the horses, and to give the hogs water. About one o'clock we went on down the hill to Sabbath Day Pond and into the woods beyond it. The loads were heavy and the horses were plodding on slowly, when, just round a turn of the road in the woods ahead, we heard a deep, awful sound, like nothing that had ever come to our ears before. For an instant I thought it was thunder, it rumbled so portentously:Hough—hough—hough—hough-er-er-er-er-hhh!It reverberated through the woods till it seemed to me that the earth actually trembled.
Willis's horses stopped short. Willis himself rose to his feet, and it seemed to me his cap rose up on his head. Other indistinct sounds also came to our ears from along the road ahead, though nothing was as yet in sight. Then again that awful, prolongedHough—hough—hough!broke forth.
Close by, lumbermen had been hauling timber from the forest into the highway and had made a distinct trail across the road ditch. While Willis stood up, staring, the horses suddenly whirled half round and bolted for the lumber trail, hogs and all. They did it so abruptly that Willis had no time to control them, and when the wagon went across the ditch, he was pitched off headlong into the brush. Before I could set my feet, my span followed them across the ditch; but I managed to rein them up to a tree trunk, which the wagon tongue struck heavily. There I held them, though they still plunged and snorted in their terror.
Willis's team was running away along the lumber trail, but before it had gone fifty yards we heard a crash, and then a horrible squealing. The wagon had gone over a log or a stump and, upsetting, had spilled all ten hogs into the brushwood.
Willis now jumped to his feet and ran to help me master my team, which was still plunging violently, and I kept it headed to the tree while he got the halters and tied the horses. Just then we heard that terribleHough—hough!again, nearer now. Looking out toward the road, we saw four teams dragging large, gaudily painted cages that contained animals. The drivers, who wore a kind of red uniform, pulled up and sat looking in our direction, laughing and shouting derisively. That exasperated us so greatly that, checking our first impulse to run in pursuit of the horses and hogs, we rushed to the road to remonstrate.
It was not a full-fledged circus and menagerie, but merely a show on its way from one county fair to another. In one cage there was a boa constrictor, untruthfully advertised to be thirty feet long, which a Fat Lady exhibited at each performance, the monster coiled round her neck. In another cage were six performing monkeys and four educated dogs.
When we saw them that day on the road, the Fat Lady, said to weigh four hundred pounds, was journeying in a double-seated carriage behind the cages. Squeezed on the seat beside her, rode a queer-looking little old man, with a long white beard, whose specialty was to eat glass tumblers, or at least chew them up. He also fought on his hands and knees with one of the dogs. His barking, growling and worrying were so true to life that the spectators could scarcely tell which was the dog and which the man. On the back seat was a gypsy fortune teller and a Wild Man, alleged to hail from the jungles of Borneo and to be so dangerous that two armed keepers had to guard him in order to prevent him from destroying the local population. As we first saw him, divested of his "get-up," he looked tame enough. He was conversing sociably with the gypsy fortune teller.
But for the moment our attention and our indignation were directed mainly at the lion. He was not such a very large lion, but he certainly had a full-sized roar, and the driver of the cage sat and grinned at us.
"You've no right to be on the road with a lion roaring like that!" Willis shouted severely.
"Wal, young feller, you've no right to be on the road with such a hog smell as that!" the driver retorted. "Our lion is the best-behaved in the world; he wouldn't ha' roared ef he hadn't smelt them hogs so strong."
"But you have damaged us!" I cried. "Our horses have run away and smashed things! You'll have to pay for this!"
Another man, who appeared to be the proprietor, now came from a wagon in the rear of the cavalcade.
"What's that about damages?" he cried. "I'll pay nothing! I have a permit to travel on the highway!"
"You have no right to scare horses!" Willis retorted. "Your lion made a horrible noise."
"His noise wasn't worse than your hog stench!" the showman rejoined hotly. "My lion has as good a right to roar as your hogs have to squeal. Drive on!" he shouted to his drivers.
The show moved forward. The Fat Lady looked back and laughed, and the Wild Man pretended to squeal like a pig; but the gypsy fortune teller smiled and said, "Too bad!"
Having got no satisfaction, we returned hastily to chase our runaway team. We came upon it less than a hundred yards away, jammed fast between two pine trees. Parts of the harness were broken, the wagon body was shattered, and ten hogs were at large.
For some minutes we were at a loss to know what to do. How to catch the hogs and put them back into the wagon was a difficult matter, for many of them weighed three hundred pounds, and moreover a live hog is a disagreeable animal to lay hands on. But, taking an axe, we cut young pine trees and constructed a fence round the wagon to serve as a hogpen. Leaving a gap at one end that could be stopped when the hogs were inside, we then set near the wagon the troughs we had brought, poured the dry corn into them and called the hogs as if it were feeding time. Most of them, it seemed, were not far away. As soon as they heard the corn rattling into the troughs all except three came crowding in. Presently we drove two of the missing ones to the pen, but one we could not find.
None of the wagon wheels was broken, and in the course of an hour or two, Willis and I succeeded in patching up the shattered body sufficiently to hold the hogs. But how to get the heavy brutes off the ground and up into the wagon was a task beyond our resources. When you try to take a live hog off its feet, he is likely to bite as well as to squeal. We had no tackle for lifting them.
At last Willis set off to get help. He was gone till dusk and came back without any one; but he had persuaded two Shakers to come and help us early the next morning—they could not come that night on account of their evening prayer meeting. One of the Shaker women had sent a loaf of bread and a piggin half full of Shaker apple sauce to us.
The lantern and bucket that went with Willis's wagon had been smashed; but I had a similar outfit with mine. So we tied the horses to trees near our improvised hog pound, and fed and blanketed them by lantern light. Afterwards we brought water for them from a brook not far away.
It was nine o'clock before we were ready to eat our own supper of bread and Shaker apple sauce. The night was chilly; our lantern went out for lack of oil; we had only light overcoats for covering; and as we had used our last two matches in lighting the lantern, we could not kindle a fire.
The night was so cold that we frequently had to jump up and run round to get warm. We slept scarcely at all. The hogs squealed. They, too, were cold as well as hungry, and toward morning they quarreled, bit one another and made piercing outcries.
"Oh, don't I wish 'twas morning!" Willis exclaimed again and again.
Fortunately, the Shakers were early risers, and long before sunrise three of them, clad in gray homespun frocks and broad-brimmed hats, appeared. They greeted us solemnly.
"Thee has met with trouble," said one of them, who was the elder of the village. "But I think we can give thee aid."
They proved to be past masters at handling hogs. From one of the halters they contrived a muzzle to prevent the hogs from biting us, and then with their help we caught and muzzled the hogs one by one and boosted them into the wagon. The good men stayed by us till the horses were hitched up and we were out of the woods and on the highway again. I had a little money with me and offered to pay them for their kind services, but the elder said:
"Nay, friend, thee has had trouble enough already with the lion." And at parting all three said "Fare thee well" very gravely.
We fared on, but not altogether well, for those hungry hogs were now making a terrible uproar. We drove as far as Gray Corners, where there was a country store, and there I bought a bushel of oats for the horses and a hundred-pound bag of corn for the hogs. The hogs were so ravenous that it was hard to be sure that each got his proper share; but we did the best we could and somewhat reduced their squealing.
The hastily repaired wagon body had also given us trouble, for it had threatened to shake to pieces as it jolted over the frozen ruts of the road; but we bought a pound of nails, borrowed a hammer and set to work to repair it better, with the hogs still aboard—much to the amusement of a crowd of boys who had collected. It was almost noon when we left Gray Corners, and it was after three o'clock before we reached Westbrook, five miles out of Portland. Here whom should we see but the old Squire, who, growing anxious over our failure to appear, had driven out to meet us. He could not help smiling when he heard Willis's indignant account of what had delayed us.
He thought it likely that we could recover the missing hog, and that evening he inserted a notice of the loss in theEastern Argus. But nothing came of the notice or of the many inquiries that we made on our way home the next day. The animal had wandered off, and whoever captured it apparently kept quiet. Instead of blaming us, however, the old Squire praised us.
"You did well, boys, in trying circumstances," he said. "You do not meet a lion every day."
After what had happened, Willis and I felt much interest the following week in seeing the show that had discomfited us. It had established itself at the county fair in its big tent and apparently was doing a rushing business. Buying admission tickets, Willis and I went in and approached the lion's cage for a nearer view of the king of beasts. We hoped he would spring up and roar as he had done in the woods below the Shaker village; but he kept quiet. After all, he did not look very formidable, and he seemed sadly oppressed and bored.
I think the proprietor of the show recognized us, for we saw him regarding us suspiciously; and we moved on to the cage in which the Wild Man sat, with a big brass chain attached to his leg—ostensibly to prevent him from running amuck among the spectators. Two of his keepers were guarding him, with axes in their hands. He was loosely arrayed in a tiger's skin, and his limbs appeared to be very hairy. His skin was dark brown and rough with warts. His hair, which was really a wig, hung in tangled snarls over his eyes. He gnashed his teeth, clenched his fists, and every few moments he uttered a terrific yell at which timid patrons of the show promptly retired to the far side of the tent.
When Willis and I approached the cage, a smile suddenly broke across the Wild Man's face, and he nodded to us. "You were the fellows with the hogs, weren't you?" he said in very good English. I can hardly describe what a shock that gave us.
"Why, why—aren't you from the wilds of Borneo?" Willis asked him in low tones.
"Thunder, no!" the Wild Man replied confidentially. "I don't even know where it is. I'm from over in Vermont—Bellows Falls."
"But—but—you do look pretty savage!" stammered Willis in much astonishment.
"You bet!" said the Wild Man. "Ain't this a dandy rig? It gets 'em, too. But don't give me away; I get a good living out of this."
Just then a group of spectators came crowding forward, and the Wild Man let out a howl that brought them to an appalled halt. The keepers brandished their axes.
"Well, did you ever?" Willis muttered as we moved on. "Doesn't that beat everything?"
The Fat Lady was ponderously unwinding the coils of the boa constrictor from round her neck as we paused in front of her cage, but presently she recognized us and smiled. We asked her whether she wasn't afraid to let the snake coil itself round her neck.
"No, not when he has had his powders," she replied. "Sometimes, when he is waking up, I have to be a little careful not to let him get clean round me, or he'd give me a squeeze."
The old man and the educated dogs had just finished their performance when we came in, and so we went over to the platform on the other side of the tent, where the gypsy fortune teller was plying her vocation.
"Cross me palm, young gentlemen," she droned. "Cross me palm wi' siller, and I'll tell your fortunes and all that's going to happen to you." Then she, too, recognized us and smiled. "Did you find your hogs?" she asked.
"All but one," Willis told her.
"It was too bad," she said, "but you never will get anything out of the boss of this show. He's a brute! He cheats me out of half my contract money right along."
"Where do you come from?" Willis said with a knowing air. "You are no gypsy."
"No, indeed!" the girl replied, laughing, and, rubbing a place on the back of her left hand, she showed us that her skin was white under the walnut stain. "I'm from Albany. I live with my mother there, and I'm sending my brother to the Troy Polytechnic School."
"Well, did you ever!" Willis said again as, now completely disillusioned, we left the tent.
There was what the farmers and indeed the whole country deemed "hard times" that fall, and the "hard times" grew harder. Again we young folks had been obliged to put off attending school at the village Academy—much to the disappointment of Addison and Theodora.
Money was scarce, and all business ventures seemed to turn out badly. Everything appeared to be going wrong, or at least people imagined so. Uncle Solon Chase from Chase's Mills—afterward the Greenback candidate for the Presidency—was driving about the country with his famous steers and rack-cart, haranguing the farmers and advocating unlimited greenback money.
To add to our other troubles at the old Squire's that fall, our twelve Jersey cows began giving bitter milk, so bitter that the cream was affected and the butter rendered unusable. Yet the pasture was an excellent one, consisting of sweet uplands, fringed round with sugar-maples, oaks and beeches, where the cleared land extended up the hillsides into the borders of the great woods.
For some time we were wholly at a loss to know what caused all those cows to give bitter milk.
A strange freak also manifested itself in our other herd that summer; first one of our Black Dutch belted heifers, and then several others took to gnawing the bark from young trees in their pasture and along the lanes to the barn. Before we noticed what they were doing, the bark from twenty or more young maples, elms and other trees had been gnawed and stripped off as high as the heifers could reach. It was not from lack of food; there was grass enough in the pasture, and provender and hay at the barn; but an abnormal appetite had beset them; they would even pull off the tough bark of cedars, in the swamp by the brook, and stand for hours, trying to masticate long, stringy strips of it.
In consequence, probably, of eating so much indigestible bark, first one, then another, "lost her cud," that is, was unable to raise her food for rumination at night; and as cattle must ruminate, we soon had several sick animals to care for.
In such cases, if the animal can only be started chewing an artificially prepared cud she will often, on swallowing it, "raise" again; and rumination, thus started, will proceed once more, and the congestion be relieved.
For a week or more we were kept busy, night and morning, furnishing the bark-eaters with cuds, prepared from the macerated inner bark of sweet elder, impregnated with rennet. These had to be put in the mouths of the cows by main strength, and held there till from force of habit the animal began chewing, swallowing and "raising" again.
What was stranger, this unnatural appetite for gnawing bark was not confined wholly to cows that fall; the shoats out in the orchard took to gnawing apple-trees, and spoiled several valuable Sweetings and Gravensteins before the damage was discovered. It was an "off year." Every living thing seemed to require a tonic.
The bitter milk proved the most difficult problem. No bitter weed or foul grass grew in the pasture. The herd had grazed there for years; nothing of the sort had been noticed before.
The village apothecary, who styled himself a chemist, was asked to give an opinion on a specimen of the cream; but he failed to throw much light on the subject. "There seems to be tannic acid in this milk," he said.
At about that time uncle Solon Chase came along one afternoon, and gave one of his harangues at our schoolhouse. I well remember the old fellow and his high-pitched voice. Addison, I recall, refused to go to hear him; but Willis Murch and I went. We were late and had difficulty in squeezing inside the room. Uncle Solon, as everybody called him, stood at the teacher's desk, and was talking in his quaint, homely way: a lean man in farmer's garb, with a kind of Abraham Lincoln face, honest but humorous, droll yet practical; a face afterwards well known from Maine to Iowa.
"We farmers are bearin' the brunt of the hard times," Uncle Solon said. "'Tain't fair. Them rich fellers in New York, and them rich railroad men that's running things at Washington have got us down. 'Tis time we got up and did something about it. 'Tis time them chaps down there heard the tramp o' the farmers' cowhide boots, comin' to inquire into this. And they'll soon hear 'em. They'll soon hear the tramp o' them old cowhides from Maine to Texas.
"Over in our town we have got a big stone mortar. It will hold a bushel of corn. When the first settlers came there and planted a crop, they hadn't any gristmill. So they got together and made that 'ere mortar out of a block of granite. They pecked that big, deep hole in it with a hammer and hand-drill. That hole is more'n two feet deep, but they pecked it out, and then made a big stone pestle nearly as heavy as a man could lift, to pound their corn.
"They used to haul that mortar and pestle round from one log house to another, and pounded all their corn-meal in it.
"Now d'ye know what I would do if I was President? I'd get out that old stone mortar and pestle, and I'd put all the hard money in this country in it, all the rich man's hard money, and I'd pound it all up fine. I'd make meal on't!"
"And what would you do with the meal?" some one cried.
Uncle Solon banged his fist on the desk. "I'd make greenbacks on't!" he shouted, and then there was great applause.
That solution of the financial problem sounded simple enough; and yet it was not quite so clear as it might be.
Uncle Solon went on to picture what a bright day would dawn if only the national government would be reasonable and issue plenty of greenbacks; and when he had finished his speech, he invited every one who was in doubt, or had anything on his mind, to ask questions.
"Ask me everything you want to!" he cried. "Ask me about anything that's troublin' your mind, and I'll answer if I can, and the best I can."
There was something about Uncle Solon which naturally invited confidence, and for fully half an hour the people asked questions, to all of which he replied after his quaint, honest fashion.
"You might ask him what makes cows give bitter milk," Willis whispered to me, and laughed. "He's an old farmer."
"I should like to," said I, but I had no thoughts of doing so—when suddenly Willis spoke up:
"Uncle Solon, there is a young fellow here who would like to ask you what makes his cows give bitter milk this fall, but he is bashful."
"Haw! haw!" laughed Uncle Solon. "Wal, now, he needn't be bashful with me, for like's not I can tell him. Like's not 'tis the bitterness in the hearts o' people, that's got into the dumb critters."
Uncle Solon's eyes twinkled, and he laughed, as did everybody else.
"Or, like's not," he went on, "'tis something the critters has et. Shouldn't wonder ef 'twas. What kind of a parster are them cows runnin' in?"
Somewhat abashed, I explained, and described the pasture at the old Squire's.
"How long ago did the milk begin to be bitter?"
"About three weeks ago."
"Any red oak in that parster?" asked Uncle Solon.
"Yes," I said. "Lots of red oaks, all round the borders of the woods."
"Wal, now, 'tis an acorn year," said Uncle Solon, reflectively. "I dunno, but ye all know how bitter a red-oak acorn is. I shouldn't wonder a mite ef your cows had taken to eatin' them oak acorns. Critters will, sometimes. Mine did, once. Fust one will take it up, then the rest will foller."
An approving chuckle at Uncle Solon's sagacity ran round, and some one asked what could be done in such a case to stop the cows from eating the acorns.
"Wal, I'll tell ye what I did," said Uncle Solon, his homely face puckering in a reminiscent smile. "I went out airly in the mornin', before I turned my cows to parster, and picked up the acorns under all the oak-trees. I sot down on a rock, took a hammer and cracked them green acorns, cracked 'em 'bout halfway open at the butt end. With my left-hand thumb and forefinger, I held the cracked acorn open by squeezing it, and with my right I dropped a pinch o' Cayenne pepper into each acorn, then let 'em close up again.
"It took me as much as an hour to fix up all them acorns. Then I laid them in little piles round under the trees, and turned out my cows. They started for the oaks fust thing, for they had got a habit of going there as soon as they were turned to parster in the morning. I stood by the bars and watched to see what would happen."
Here a still broader smile overspread Uncle Solon's face. "Within ten minutes I saw all them cows going lickety-split for the brook on the lower side o' the parster, and some of 'em were in such a hurry that they had their tails right up straight in the air!
"Ef you will believe it," Uncle Solon concluded, "not one of them cows teched an oak acorn afterward."
Another laugh went round; but an interruption occurred. A good lady from the city, who was spending the summer at a farmhouse near by, rose in indignation and made herself heard.
"I think that was a very cruel thing to do!" she cried. "I think it was shameful to treat your animals so!"
"Wal, now, ma'am, I'm glad you spoke as you did. I'm glad to know that you've got a kind heart," said Uncle Solon. "Kind-heartedness to man and beast is one of the best things in life. It's what holds this world together. Anybody that uses Cayenne pepper to torture an animal, or play tricks on it, is no friend of mine, I can tell ye.
"But you see, ma'am, it is this way. Country folks who keep dumb animals of all kinds know a good many things about them that city folks don't. Like human beings, dumb animals sometimes go all wrong, and have to be corrected. Of course, we can't reason with them. So we have to do the next best thing, and correct them as we can.
"I had a little dog once that I was tremendous fond of," Uncle Solon continued. "His name was Spot. He was a bird-dog, and so bright it seemed as if he could almost talk. But he took to suckin' eggs, and began to steal eggs at my neighbors' barns and hen-houses. He would fetch home eggs without crackin' the shells, and hold 'em in his mouth so cunning you wouldn't know he had anything there. He used to bury them eggs in the garden and all about.
"Of course that made trouble with the neighbors. It looked as if I'd have to kill Spot, and I hated to do it, for I loved that little dog. But I happened to think of Cayenne. So I took and blowed an egg—made a hole at each end and blowed out the white and the yelk. I mixed the white with Cayenne pepper and put it back through the hole. Then I stuck little pieces of white paper over both holes, and laid the egg where I knew Spot would find it.
"He found it, and about three minutes after that I saw him going to the brook in a hurry. He had quite a time on't, sloshin' water, coolin' off his mouth—and I never knew him to touch an egg afterward.
"But I see, ma'am, that you have got quite a robustious prejudice against Cayenne. It isn't such bad stuff, after all. It's fiery, but it never does any permanent harm. It's a good medicine, too, for a lot of things that ail us. Why, Cayenne pepper saved my life once. I really think so. It was when I was a boy, and boy-like, I had et a lot of green artichokes. A terrible pain took hold of me. I couldn't breathe. I thought I was surely going to die; but my mother gave me a dose of Cayenne and molasses, and in ten minutes I was feeling better.
"And even now, old as I am, when I get cold and feel pretty bad, I go and take a good stiff dose of Cayenne and molasses, and get to bed. In fifteen minutes I will be in a perspiration; pretty soon I'll go to sleep; and next morning I'll feel quite smart again.
"Just you try that, ma'am, the next time you get a cold. You will find it will do good. It is better than so much of that quinin that they are givin' us nowadays. That quinin raises Cain with folks' ears. It permanently injures the hearin'.
"When I advise any one to use Cayenne, either to cure a dog that sucks eggs or cows that eat acorns, I advise it as a medicine, just as I would ef the animal was sick. And you mustn't think, ma'am, that we farmers are so hard-hearted and cruel as all that, for our hearts are just as tender and compassionate to animals as if we lived in a great city."
Uncle Solon may not have been a safe guide for the nation's finances, but he possessed a valuable knowledge of farm life and farm affairs.
I went home; and the next morning we tried the quaint old Greenbacker's "cure" for bitter milk; it "worked" as he said it would.
We also made a sticky wash, of which Cayenne was the chief ingredient, for the trunks of the young trees along the lanes and in the orchard, and after getting a taste of it, neither the Black Dutch belted heifers nor the hogs did any further damage. A young neighbor of ours has also cured her pet cat of slyly pilfering eggs at the stable, in much the way Uncle Solon cured his dog.