[A]The trees girdled, and left to die and decay, standing.
[A]The trees girdled, and left to die and decay, standing.
Presently, at a little clearing, we came to a log-cabin; the blue smoke curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the soft, low hum of a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew, dripped round us; and I was profoundly at peace. The homesick will understand how it was that I was as if saved from death.
At last we crossed a tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log-cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was “company.”
It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely-fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through all the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and admired the familiar outside of the house as freshly as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood-fires blazed upon the hearths, and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.
I must have gone through the old log-cabin to see how it looked without us, but I have no recollection of ever entering its door again, so soon had it ceased to be part of my life. We remained in the new house, as we continued to call it, for two or three months, and then the changes of business which had been taking place without the knowledge of us children called us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and the pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode in city streets again. We went to live in the ordinary brick house of our civilization, but we had grown so accustomed, with the quick and facile adaptation of children, to living in a house which was merely lathed, that we distinguished this last dwelling from the new house as a “plastered house.”
Some of our playmates of the neighborhood walked part of the way to X—— with us boys, on the snowy morning when we turned our backs on the new house to take the train in that town. A shadow of the gloom in which our spirits were steeped passes over me again, but chieflyI remember our difficulties in getting our young Newfoundland dog away with us; and our subsequent embarrassments with this animal on the train, where he sat up and barked out of the window at the passing objects, and finally became seasick, blot all other memories of that time from my mind.
I hadnot seen the old place for thirty years, when, four years ago, I found myself in the pretty little town of X——, which had once appeared so lordly and so proud to my poor rustic eyes, with a vacant half-day on my hands. I hired a buggy and a boy, and had him drive me down to that point on the river where our mills at least used to be.
The road was all strange to me, and when I reached my destination that was stranger still. The timber had been cut from the hill and island, and where the stately hickories had once towered and the sycamores drooped there was now a bald knob and a sterile tract of sand, good hardly for the grazing of the few cows that cropped its scanty herbage. They were both very much smaller: the hill was not the mountain it had seemed, the island no longer rivalled the proportions of England.
The grist-mill, whose gray bulk had kept so large a place in my memory, was sadly dwarfed, and in its decrepitude it had canted backwards, and seemed tottering to its fall. I explored it from wheel-pit to cooling-floor; there was not an Indian in it, but, ah! what ghosts! ghosts of the living and the dead; my brothers’, my playmates’, my own! At last, it was really haunted. I think no touch of repair had been put upon it, or upon the old saw-mill, either, on whose roof the shingles had all curled up like the feathers of a frizzly chicken in the rains and suns of those thirty summers past. The head-race, once a type of silent, sullen power, now crept feebly to its work; even the water seemed to have grown old, and anything might have battled successfully with the currents where the spool-pig was drowned and the miller’s boy was carried so near his death.
I had with me for company the boy of the present miller, who silently followed me about, and answered my questions as he could. The epoch of our possession was as remote and as unstoried to him asthat of the Mound-Builders. A small frame house, exactly the size and shape of our log-cabin, occupied its site, and he had never even heard that any other house had ever stood there. The “new house,” shingled and weather-boarded with black-walnut, had bleached to a silvery gray, and had no longer a trace of its rich brown. He let me go into it, and wander about at will. It was very little, and the small rooms were very low. It was plastered now; it was even papered; but it was not half so fine as it used to be.
I asked him if there was a graveyard on top of the hill, and he said, “Yes; an old one;” and we went up together to look at it, with its stones all fallen or sunken away, and no memory of the simple, harmless man and his little children whom I had seen laid there, going down with each into the dust in terror and desolation of spirit. His widow probably no longer wears dresses of changeable silk; and where is the orphan boy in the oil-cloth cap? In Congress, for all I know.
I looked across the bare island to wheretheir cabin had stood, and my eyes might as well have sought the cities of the plain. The boy at my elbow could not make out why the gray-mustached, middle-aged man should care, and when I attempted to tell him that I had once been a boy of his age there, and that this place had been my home, the boy of whom I have here written so freely seemed so much less a part of me than the boy to whom I spoke, that, upon the whole, I had rather a sense of imposing upon my listener.
THE END