 5 Young Hunters. American Head Hunters. Deer. A Resurrected Woodpecker. Muskrats. Foxes and Badgers. A Pet Coon. Bathing. Squirrels. Gophers. A Berglaria Shrike. In the older Eastern States it used to be considered great sport for an army of boys to assemble to hunt birds, squirrels, and every other unclaimed, unprotected, live thing of shootable size. They divided into two squads and choosing leaders scattered through the woods in different directions, and the party that killed the greatest number enjoyed a supper at the expense of the other. The whole neighborhood seemed to enjoy the shameful sport, especially the farmers afraid of their crops. With a great air of importance, laws were enacted to govern the gory business. For example, a gray squirrel must count four heads, a woodchuck six heads, common red squirrel two heads, black squirrel ten heads, a partridge five heads, the larger birds such as whipper-wills and night hawks two heads each, the wary crows three, and bobwhites three, but all the blessed company of mere songbirds, warblers, robins, thrushes, orials, woodnut hatches, chickadees, blue jays, woodpeckers, et cetera, counted only one head each. The heads of the birds were hastily rung off and thrust into the game bags to be counted, saving the bodies only of what were called game, the larger squirrels, bobwhites, partridges, et cetera. The blood-stained bags of the best slayers were soon bulging full. Then, at a given hour, all had to stop and repair to the town, empty their dripping sacks, count the heads and go rejoicing to their dinner. Although, like other wild boys, I was fond of shooting, I never had anything to do with these abominable head hunts. And now, the farmers having learned that birds are their friends, wholesale slaughter has been abolished. We seldom saw deer, though their tracks were common. The Yankee explained that they traveled and fed mostly at night, and hid in tamarack swamps and brushy places in the daytime, and how the Indians knew all about them and could find them whenever they were hungry. Indians belonging to the Menominee and Winnebago tribes occasionally visited us at our cabin to get a piece of bread or some matches or to sharpen their knives on our grindstone, and we boys watched them closely to see that they didn't steal jack. We wondered at their knowledge of animals when we saw them go direct to trees on our farm, chop holes in them with their tomahawks, and take out coons of the existence of which we had never noticed the slightest trace. In winter, after the first snow, we frequently saw three or four Indians hunting deer in company, running like hounds on the fresh exciting tracks. The escape of the deer from these noiseless, tireless hunters was said to be well nigh impossible. They were followed to the death. Most of our neighbors brought some sort of gun from the old country, but seldom took time to hunt, even after the first hard work of fencing and clearing was over, except to shoot a duck or prairie chicken now and then that happened to come in their way. It was only the less industrious American settlers who left their work to go far of hunting. Two or three of our most enterprising American neighbors went off every fall with their teams to the pine regions and cranberry marshes in the northern part of the state to hunt and gather berries. I well remember seeing their wagons loaded with game when they returned from a successful hunt. Their loads consisted usually of half a dozen deer or more, one or two black bears, and fifteen or twenty bushels of cranberries all solidly frozen. Part of both the berries and meat was usually sold in portage. The balance furnished their families with abundance of venison, bear grease, and pies. Winter wheat is sown in the fall, and when it is a month or so old, the deer, like the wild geese, are very fond of it, especially since other kinds of food are then becoming scarce. One of our neighbors across the Fox River killed a large number, some thirty or forty, on a small patch of wheat, simply by lying in wait for them every night. Our wheat field was the first that was sown in the neighborhood. The deer soon found it and came in every night to feast, but it was eight or nine years before we ever disturbed them. David then killed one deer, the only one killed by any of our family. He went out shortly after sundown at the time of full moon to one of our wheat fields, carrying a double-barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot. After lying in wait an hour or so, he saw a doe and her fawn jump the fence and come cautiously into the wheat. After they were within sixty or seventy yards of him, he was surprised when he tried to take aim that about half of the moon's disc was mysteriously darkened as if covered by the edge of a dense cloud. This proved to be an eclipse. Nevertheless he fired at the mother, and she immediately ran off, jumped the fence, and took to the woods by the way she came. The fawn danced about, bewildered, wondering what had become of its mother, but finally fled to the woods. David fired at the poor deserted thing as it ran past him, but happily missed it. Hearing the shots, I joined David to learn his luck. He said he thought he must have wounded the mother, and when we were strolling about in the woods in search of her, we saw three or four deer on their way to the wheat field, led by a fine buck. They were walking rapidly, but cautiously halted at intervals of a few rods to listen and look ahead and send the air. They failed to notice us, though by this time the moon was out of the eclipse shadow, and we were standing only about fifty yards from them. I was carrying the gun. David had fired both barrels, but when he was reloading one of them he happened to put the wad intended to cover the shot into the empty barrel, and so when we were climbing over the fence the buck shot had rolled out, and when I fired at the big buck I knew by the report that there was nothing but powder in the charge. The startled deer danced about in confusion for a few seconds, uncertain which way to run until they caught sight of us when they bounded off through the woods. Next morning we found the poor mother lying about three hundred yards from the place where she was shot. She had run this distance and jumped a high fence after one of the buck shot had passed through her heart. Accepting Sundays we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves, the Fourth of July and the First of January. Sundays were less than half our own, on account of Bible lessons, Sunday school lessons and church services. All the others were labor days, rain or shine, cold or warm. No wonder, then, that our two holidays were precious and that it was not easy to decide what to do with them. They were usually spent on the highest rocky hill in the neighborhood called the Observatory, in visiting our boyfriends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, wrestle, and play games, in reading some new favorite book we had managed to borrow or buy, or in making models of machines I had invented. One of our July days was spent with two scotch boys of our own age hunting red-wing blackbirds then busy in the corn fields. Our party had only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest and perhaps because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of carrying. We marched through the corn without getting sight of a single red-wing, but just as we reached the far side of the field a red-headed woodpecker flew up and the Lawson boys cried, shoot him, shoot him, he is just as bad as the blackbird, he eats corn. This memorable woodpecker alighted in the top of a white oak tree about fifty feet high. I fired from a position almost immediately beneath him, and he fell straight down at my feet. When I picked him up and was admiring his plumage he moved his legs slightly, and I said, poor bird, he's no dead yet and will have to kill him to put him out of pain, sincerely pitting him after we had taken pleasure in shooting him. I had seen servant girls ringing chicken necks, so with desperate humanity I took the limp unfortunate by the head, swung him around three or four times thinking I was ringing his neck and then threw him hard on the ground to quench the last possible spark of life and make quick death doubly sure. But, to our astonishment, the moment he struck the ground he gave a cry of alarm and flew right straight up like a rejoicing lark into the top of the same tree and perhaps to the same branch he had fallen from, and began to adjust his ruffled feathers, nodding and chirping and looking down at us as if wondering what in the bird-world we had been doing to him. This, of course, banished all thought of killing. As far as that revived woodpecker was concerned, no matter how many ears of corn he might spoil, and we all heartily congratulated him on his wonderful triumphant resurrection from three kinds of death, shooting, neck ringing, and destructive concussion. I suppose only one pellet had touched him glancing on his head. Another extraordinary shooting affair happened one summer morning shortly after daybreak. When I went to the stable to feed the horses, I noticed a big white-breasted hawk on a tall oak in front of the chicken-house, evidently waiting for a chicken breakfast. I ran to the house for the gun, and when I fired he fell about halfway down the tree, caught a branch with his claws, hung back downward and fluttered a few seconds, then managed to stand erect. I fired again to put him out of pain, and to my surprise the second shot seemed to restore his strength instead of killing him, for he flew out of the tree and over the meadow with strong and regular wing-beats for thirty or forty rods, apparently as well as ever, but died suddenly in the air and dropped like a stone. We hunted muskrats whenever we had time to run down to the lake. They are brown, bunchy animals about twenty-three inches long, the tail being about nine inches in length, black in color and flattened vertically for sculling, and behind feet are half webbed. They look like little beavers, usually have from ten to a dozen young, are easily tamed and make interesting pets. We like to watch them at their work and at their meals. In the spring when the snow vanishes and the lake ice begins to melt, the first open spot is always used as a feeding-place, where they dive from the edge of the ice, and in a minute or less reappear with a mussel or a mouthful of ponte d'aria or waterlily leaves, climb back onto the ice and sit up to nibble their food, handling it very much like squirrels or marmots. It is then that they are most easily shot, a solitary hunter oftentimes shooting thirty or forty in a single day. Their nests on the rushy margins of lakes and streams, far from being hidden like those of most birds, are conspicuously large and conical in shape like Indian wigwams. They are built of plants, rushes, sedges, mosses, etc., and ornamented around the base with mussel shells. It was always pleasant and interesting to see them in the fall as soon as the nights began to be frosty, hard at work cutting sedges on the edge of the meadow or swimming out through the rushes, making long, glittering ripples as they scull themselves along, diving where the water is perhaps six or eight feet deep, and reappearing in a minute or so with large mouthfuls of the weedy, tangled plants gathered from the bottom, returning to their big wigwams, climbing up and depositing their loads where most needed to make them yet larger and firmer and warmer, foreseeing the freezing weather just like ourselves when we banked up our house to keep out the frost. They lie snug and invisible all winter, but do not hibernate. Through a channel carefully kept open they swim out under the ice for mussels and the roots and stems of water lilies, etc., on which they feed just as they do in summer. Sometimes the oldest and most enterprising of them ventured to orchards near the water in search of fallen apples. Very seldom, however, do they interfere with anything belonging to their mortal enemy, man. Notwithstanding they are so well hidden and protected during the winter, many of them are killed by Indian hunters, who creep up softly and spear them through the thick walls of their cabins. Indians are fond of their flesh, and so are some of the wildest of the white trappers. They are easily caught in steel traps, and after vainly trying to drag their feet from the cruel, crushing jaws they sometimes in their agony gnaw them off. Even after having gnawed off a leg, they are so guileless that they never seem to learn to know and fear traps, for some of them are occasionally found that have been caught twice and have gnawed off a second foot. Many other animals suffering excruciating pain in these cruel traps gnaw off their legs. Crabs and lobsters are so fortunate as to be able to shed their limbs when caught or merely frightened, apparently without suffering any pain, simply by giving themselves a little shivery shake. The muskrat is one of the most notable and widely distributed of American animals, and millions of the gentle, industrious, beaver-like creatures are shot and trapped and speared every season for their skins with a dime or so, like shooting boys and girls for their garments. Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when God-like human beings will become truly humane and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the meantime, we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hail red-blooded boys are savage, the best and boldest, the savagest, font of hunting and fishing. But when thoughtless childhood is passed, the best rise, the highest above all this bloody flesh and sport business, the wild foundational animal dying out day by day as divine, uplifting, transfiguring charity grows in. Hairs and rabbits were seldom seen when we first settled in the Wisconsin woods. But they multiplied rapidly after the animals that preyed upon them had been thinned out or exterminated, and food and shelters supplied in grain fields and log fences, and the thickets of young oaks that grew up in pastures after the annual grass fires were kept out. Catching hairs in the wintertime when they were hidden in hollow fence logs was a favorite pastime with many of the boys whose fathers allowed them time to enjoy the sport. Occasionally a stout, lithe hair was carried out into an open snow-covered field set free and given a chance for its life in a race for the dog. When the snow was not too soft and deep, it usually made good its escape, for our dogs were only fat, short-legged mongrels. We sometimes discovered hairs in standing hollow trees, crouching on decayed, punky wood at the bottom, as far back as possible from the opening, but when alarmed they managed to climb to a considerable height if the hollow was not too wide, by bracing themselves against the sides. Boxes, though not uncommon, wee boys held steadily to work seldom saw, and as they found plenty of prairie chickens for themselves and families, they did not often come near the farmer's hen-boosts. Nevertheless the discovery of their dens was considered important. No matter how deep the den might be it was thoroughly explored with pick and shovel by sport-loving settlers at a time when they judged the fox was likely to be at home, but I cannot remember any case in our neighborhood where the fox was actually captured. In one of the dens a mile or two from our farm a lot of prairie chickens were found and some smaller birds. Badger dens were far more common than fox dens, one of our fields was named Badger Hill from the number of Badger holes in a hill at the end of it, but I cannot remember seeing a single one of the inhabitants. On a stormy day in the middle of an unusually severe winter a black bear, hungry no doubt, and seeking something to eat, came strolling down through our neighborhood from the northern pine woods. None had been seen here before and it caused no little excitement and alarm, for the European settlers imagined that these poor timid bashful bears were as dangerous as man-eating lions and tigers and that they would pursue any human being that came in their way. This species is common in the north part of the state and few of our enterprising Yankee hunters who went to the pineries in the fall failed to shoot at least one of them. We saw very little of the owlish, serious-looking coons, and no wonder, since they lie hidden nearly all day in hollow trees and we never had time to hunt them. We often heard their curious, quivering, whinnying cries on still evenings, but only once succeeded in tracing an unfortunate family through our cornfield to their den in a big oak and catching them all. One of our neighbors, Mr. McGrath, a Highland Scotchman, caught one and made a pet of it. It became very tame and had perfect confidence in the good intentions of its kind friend and master. He always addressed it in speaking to it as a little man. When it came running to him and jumped on his lap or climbed up his trousers, he would say while patting its head as if it were a dog or a child, Cooney-mamanee, Cooney-mamanee, how are ye the day? I think you're hungry, as the comical pet began to examine his pockets for nuts and bits of bread. Nah, nah, there's nothing in my pooch for ye the day, my ween manee, but I'll get ye something. He would then fetch something it liked, bread, nuts, a carrot, or perhaps a piece of fresh meat. Anything scattered for it on the floor it felt with its paw instead of looking at it, judging of its worth more by touch than sight. The outlet of our fountain lake flowed past Mr. McGrath's door, and the coon was very fond of swimming in it and searching for frogs and mussels. It seemed perfectly satisfied to stay about the house without being confined, occupied a comfortable bed in a section of a hollow tree, and never wandered far. How long it lived after the death of its kind master, I don't know. I suppose that almost any wild animal may be made a pet, simply by sympathizing with it and entering as much as possible into its life. In Alaska I saw one of the common gray mountain marmots kept as a pet in an Indian family. When its master entered the house, it always seemed glad, almost like a dog, and when cold or tired it snuggled up in a fold of its blanket with the utmost confidence. We have all heard of ferocious animals, lions and tigers, etc., that were fed and spoken to only by their masters, becoming perfectly tame, and, as is well known, the faithful dog that follows man and serves him, and looks up to him and loves him as if he were a god, is a descendant of the bloodthirsty wolf or jackal. Even frogs and toads and fishes may be tamed, provided they have the uniform sympathy of one person with whom they become intimately acquainted without the distracting and varying attentions of strangers. And surely all God's people, however serious and savage, great or small, like to play, whales and elephants, dancing, humming, gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes, all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them. As far as I know, all wild creatures keep themselves clean. Birds, it seems to me, take more pains to bathe and dress themselves than any other animals. Even ducks, though living so much in water, dip and scatter cleansing showers over their backs, and shake and preen their feathers as carefully as land birds. Watching small singers taking their morning baths is very interesting, particularly when the weather is cold. A lighting in a shallow pool they often times show a sort of dread of dipping into it, like children hesitating about taking a plunge, as if they felt the same kind of shock. And this makes it easy for us to sympathize with the little feathered people. Occasionally I have seen from my study window red-headed linets bathing in dew when water elsewhere was scarce. A large monterey cypress with broad branches and innumerable leaves on which the dew lodges in still nights made favorite bathing places. A lighting gently, as if afraid to waste the dew, they would pause and fidget as they do before beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter the drops and showers and get as thorough a bath as they would in a pool. I have also seen the same kind of baths taken by birds on the boughs of silver furs on the edge of a glacier meadow. But nowhere have I seen the dew drop so abundant as on the monterey cypress, and the picture made by the quivering wings and iris dew was memorably beautiful. Children, too, make fine pictures splashing and crowing in their little tubs, how widely different from wallowing pigs bathing with great show of comfort and rubbing themselves dry against rough barked trees. Some of our own species seem fairly to dread the touch of water. One the necessity of absolute cleanliness by means of frequent baths was being preached by a friend who had been reading Comby's physiology in which he had learned something of the wonders of the skin with its millions of pores that had to be kept open for health. One of our neighbors remarked, oh, that's unnatural. It's well enough to wash in a tub maybe once or twice a year, but not to be paddling in the water all the time like a frog in a spring-hole. Another neighbor who prided himself on his knowledge of big words said with great solemnity, I never can believe that man is amphibious. Natives of tropic islands pass a large part of their lives in water, and seem as much at home in the sea as on the land. Swim and dive, pursue fishes, play in the waves like surf-ducks and seals, and explore the coral gardens and groves and seaweed meadows as if truly amphibious. Even the natives of the far north bay that times I once saw a lot of Eskimo boys ducking and plashing right merrily in the Arctic Ocean. It seemed very wonderful to us that the wild animals could keep themselves warm and strong in winter when the temperature was far below zero. Feeble-looking rabbits scud away over the snow, life and elastic, as if glorying in the frosty, sparkling weather, and sure of their dinners. I have seen gray squirrels dragging ears of corn about as heavy as themselves out of our field through loose snow and up a tree, balancing them on limbs and eating in comfort with their dry electric tails spread airily over their backs. Once I saw a fine hardy fellow go into a knot-hole. Thusting in my hand, I caught him and pulled him out. As soon as he guessed what I was up to, he took the end of my thumb in his mouth and sunk his teeth right through it, but I gripped him hard by the neck, carried him home, and shut him up in a box that contained about half a bushel of hazel and hickory nuts, hoping that he would not be too much frightened and discouraged to eat while thus imprisoned after the rough handling he had suffered. I soon learned, however, that sympathy in this direction was wasted. For no sooner did I pop him in than he fell to with right-hardy appetite, gnawing and munching the nuts as if he had gathered them himself, and was very hungry that day. Therefore, after allowing time enough for a good square meal, I made haste to get him out of the nut-box and shut him up in a spare bedroom, in which father had hung a lot of selected ears of Indian corn for seed. They were hung up by the husks on cords stretched across from side to side of the room. The squirrel managed to jump from the top of one of the bed-posts to the cord, cut off an ear, and let it drop to the floor. He then jumped down, got a good grip of the heavy ear, carried it to the top of one of the slippery, polished bed-posts, seated himself comfortably, and, holding it well balanced, deliberately pried out one kernel at a time with his long, chiseled teeth, ate the soft, sweet germ, and dropped the hard part of the kernel. In this masterly way, working at high speed, he demolished several ears a day, and with a good warm bed in a box, made himself at home and grew fat. Then naturally, I suppose, free-romping in the snow and treetops, with companions came to mind. Anyhow he began to look for a way of escape. Of course he first tried the window, but found that his teeth made no impression on the glass. Next he tried the sash and nod the wood off-level with the glass. Then father happened to come upstairs and discovered the mischief that was being done to his seed-corn and window, and immediately ordered him out of the house. The flying squirrel was one of the most interesting of the little animals we found in the woods, a beautiful brown creature with fine eyes and smooth, soft fur like that of a mole or field mouse. He is about half as long as the gray squirrel, but his wide-spread tail and the folds of skin along his sides that form the wings make him look broad and flat, something like a kite. In the evenings our cat often brought them to her kittens at the shanty, and later we saw them fly during the day from the trees we were chopping. They jumped and glided off smoothly and apparently without effort, like birds, as soon as they heard and felt the breaking shock of the strained fibers at the stump when the trees they were in began to totter and groan. They can fly, or rather glide, twenty or thirty yards from the top of a tree, twenty or thirty feet to the foot of another, gliding upward as they reach the trunk, or if the distance is too great they alight comfortably on the ground and make haste to the nearest tree and climb just like the wingless squirrels. Every boy and girl loves the little fairy, airy striped chipmunk, half squirrel, half spermophile. He is about the size of a field mouse and often made us think of linens and song sparrows as he frisked about gathering nuts and berries. He likes almost all kinds of grain, berries, and nuts, hazelnuts, hickory nuts, strawberries, huckleberries, wheat, oats, corn. He is fond of them all and thrives on them. Most of the hazel bushes on our farm grew along the fences, as if they had been planted for the chipmunks alone, for the rail fences were their favorite highways. We never worried watching them, especially when the hazelnuts were ripe, and the little fellows were sitting on the rails nibbling and handling them like tree squirrels. We used to notice too that, although they are very neat animals, their lips and fingers were dyed red like our own when the strawberries and huckleberries were ripe. We could always tell when the wheat and oats were in the milk by seeing the chipmunks feeding on the ears. They kept nibbling at the wheat until it was harvested and then gleamed in the stubble, keeping up a careful watch for their enemies, dogs, hawks, and shrikes. They are as widely distributed over the continent as the squirrels, various species inhabiting different regions on the mountains and lowlands, but all the different kinds have the same general characteristics of light, airy cheerfulness, and good nature. Before the arrival of farmers in the Wisconsin woods, the small ground squirrels called gophers lived chiefly on the seeds of wild grasses and weeds, but after the country was cleared and plowed, no feasting animal fell too more heartily on the farmer's wheat and corn. Increasing rapidly in numbers and knowledge, they became very destructive, especially in the spring when the corn was planted, for they learned to trace the rows and dig up and eat the three or four seeds in each hill about as fast as the poor farmers could cover them. And unless great pains were taken to diminish the numbers of the cunning little robbers, the fields had to be planted two or three times over, and even then large gaps in the rows would be found. The loss of the grain they consumed after it was ripe, together with the winter stores laid up in their burrows, amounted to little as compared with the loss of the seed on which the whole crop depended. One evening, about sundown, when my father sent me out with a shotgun to hunt them in a stubble field, I learned something curious and interesting in connection with these mischievous gophers, though just then they were doing no harm. As I strolled through the stubble, watching for a chance for a shot, a shrike flew past me and alighted on an open spot at the mouth of a burrow about thirty yards ahead of me. Curious to see what he was up to, I stood still to watch him. He looked down the gopher hole in a listening attitude, then looked back at me to see if I was coming, looked down again, and listened, and looked back at me. I stood perfectly still, and he kept twitching his tail, seeming uneasy and doubtful about venturing to do the savage job that I soon learned he had in mind. Finally, encouraged by my keeping so still, to my astonishment, he suddenly vanished in the gopher hole. A bird going down a deep, narrow hole in the ground like a ferret or a weasel seemed very strange, and I thought it would be a fine thing to run forward, clap my hand over the hole, and have the fun of imprisoning him and seeing what he would do when he tried to get out. So I ran forward, but stopped when I got within a dozen or fifteen yards of the hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to wait and see what would naturally happen without my interference. While I stood there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance going on in the burrow, a mixed lot of keen, squeaking, shrieking, distressful cries, telling that, down in the dark, something terrible was being done. Then, suddenly, out popped a half-grown gopher, four and a half or five inches long, and without stopping a single moment to choose a way of escape, ran screaming through the stubble straight away from its home, quickly followed by another and another, until some half dozen were driven out. All of them crying and running in different directions, as if at this dreadful time home, sweet home, was the most dangerous and least desirable of any place in the wide world. Then out came the shrike, flew above the runaway gopher children, and diving on them killed them, one after another, with blows at the back of the skull. He then seized one of them, dragged it to the top of a small clod so as to be able to get a start, and laboriously made out to fly with it about ten or fifteen yards when he alighted to rest. Then he dragged it to the top of another clod and flew with it about the same distance, repeating this hard work over and over again, until he managed to get one of the gophers on to the top of a log fence. How much he ate of his hard-won prey, or what he did with the others, I can't tell, for by this time the sun was down and I had to hurry home to my chores. CHAPTER 6 THE CROPS DOING CHORES, THE SITES AND sounds of winter, road-making, the spirit-wrapping craze, tuberculosis among the settlers, a cruel brother, the rites of the Indians, put to the plow at the age of twelve, in the harvest field, over industry among the settlers, running the breaking plow, digging a well, choke-damp, lining bees. At first wheat, corn, and potatoes were the principal crops we raised, wheat especially. But in four or five years the soil was so exhausted that only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better fields, was obtained. Although when first plowed twenty and twenty-five bushels was about the ordinary yield, more attention was then paid to corn, but without fertilizers the corn crop also became very meager. At last it was discovered that English clover would grow on even the exhausted fields, and that, when plowed under and planted with corn or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a complete change in farming methods. The farmers raised fertilizing clover, planted corn, and fed the crop to cattle and hogs. But no crop raised in our wilderness was so surprisingly rich and sweet and purely generous to us boys, and indeed to everybody, as the watermelons and muskmelons. We planted a large patch on a sunny hill slope the very first spring, and it seemed miraculous that a few handfuls of little flat seeds should, in a few months, send up a hundred wagon loads of crisp, sumptuous red-hearted and yellow-hearted fruits covering all the hill. We soon learned to know when they were in their prime, and when overripe and mealy. Also, that if a second crop was taken from the same ground without fertilizing it, the melons would be small and what we called soapy, that is soft and smooth, utterly un-crisp, and without a trace of the lively freshness and sweetness of those raised on virgin soil. Coming in from the farmwork at noon, the half-dozen or so of melons we had placed in our cold spring were a glorious luxury that only weary, bare-footed farmboys can ever know. Spring was not very trying as to temperature, and refreshing rains fell at short intervals. The work of plowing commenced as soon as the frost was out of the ground. Corn and potato planting and the sowing of spring wheat were comparatively light work. While the nesting birds sang cheerily, grass and flowers covered the marshes and meadows, and all the wild, unclear parts of the farm, and the trees put forth their new leaves, those of the oaks forming beautiful purple masses, as if every leaf were a petal. And with all this we enjoyed the mild soothing winds, the humming of innumerable small insects and hilas, and the freshness and fragrance of everything. Then, too, came the wonderful passenger pigeons streaming from the south, and flocks of geese and cranes filling all the sky with whistling wings. The summer work, on the contrary, was deadly heavy, especially harvesting and corn-hoeing. All the ground had to be holed over for the first few years before Father bought cultivators or small weed-covering plows, and we were not allowed a moment's rest. The hose had to be kept working up and down as steadily as if they were moved by machinery. Plowing for winter wheat was comparatively easy when we walked barefooted in the furrows, while the fine autumn tints kindled in the woods and the hillsides were covered with golden pumpkins. In summer the chores were grinding size, feeding the animals, chopping stovewood, and carrying water up the hill from the spring on the edge of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or hay-field. I was foolishly ambitious to be first in moeing and cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men. An hour was allowed at noon for dinner and more chores. We stayed in the field until dark, then supper, and still more chores, family worship, and to bed, making altogether a hard, sweaty day of about sixteen or seventeen hours. Think of that, ye blessed eight-hour-day laborers. In winter Father came to the foot of the stairs and called us at six o'clock to feed the horses and cattle, grind axes, bring in wood, and do any other chores required, then breakfast, and out to work in the mealy, frosty snow by daybreak, chopping, fencing, etc. So in general our winter work was about as restless and trying as that of the long day summer, no matter what the weather there was always something to do. During heavy rains or snowstorms we worked in the barn, shelling corn, fanning wheat, thrashing with the flail, making axe handles or oxyokes, mending things, or sprouting and sorting potatoes in the cellar. No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural hardships of this pioneer farm life, nor did any of the Europeans seem to know how to find reasonable ease and comfort if they would. The very best oak and hickory fuel was embarrassingly abundant and cost nothing but cutting and common sense, but instead of hauling great heart-shearing loads of it for wide, open, all-welcoming, climate-changing, beauty-making, god-like angle fires, it was hauled with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get it out of the way of the plow and out of the way of doing good. The only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a firebox about 18 inches long and 8 inches wide and deep, scant space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather all the family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in the morning we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid. We were not allowed to start even this despicable little fire in its black box to thaw them. No, we had to squeeze our throbbing, aching, chill-blain feet into them, causing greater pain than toothache and to hurry out to chores. Fortunately, the miserable chill-blain pain began to abate as soon as the temperature of our feet approached the freezing point, enabling us, in spite of hard work and hard frost, to enjoy the winter beauty, the wonderful radiance of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and the dawns and the sunsets and white noons, and the cheery and livening company of the brave chickadees and nut hatches. The winter stars far surpassed those of our stormy Scotland in brightness, and we gazed and gazed as though we had never seen stars before. Oftentimes the heavens were made still more glorious. By auroras the long lance rays called merry dancers in Scotland, streaming with startling tremulous motion to the zenith. Usually the electric auroral light is white or pale yellow, but in the third or fourth of our Wisconsin winters there was a magnificently colored aurora that was seen and admired over nearly all the continent. The whole sky was draped in graceful purple and crimson folds glorious beyond description. Father called us out into the yard in front of the house where we had a wide view, crying, Come, come, mother, come, barons, and see the glory of God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red light. Look straight up to the crown where the folds are gathered. Hush and wonder and adore, for surely this is the clothing of the Lord himself, and perhaps he will even now appear looking down from his high heaven. This celestial show was far more glorious than anything we had ever yet beheld, and throughout that wonderful winter hardly anything else was spoken of. We even enjoyed the snowstorms, the thronging crystals like daisies, coming down separate and distinct or very different from the tufted flakes we enjoyed so much in Scotland. When we ran into the midst of the slow-falling feathery throng shouting with enthusiasm, Janney's plucking her doos, Janney's plucking her doos, doves. Nature has many ways of thinning and pruning and trimming her forests. Lightning strokes, heavy snow, and storm winds to shatter and blow down whole trees here and there, or break off branches as required. The results of these methods I have observed in different forests, but only once have I seen pruning by rain. The rain froze on the trees as it fell and grew so thick and heavy that many of them lost a third or more of their branches. The view of the woods after the storm had passed and the sun shone forth was something never to be forgotten. Every twig and branch and rugged trunk was encased in pure crystal ice, and each oak and hickory and willow became a very crystal palace. Such dazzling brilliance, such effects of white light and iris light, glowing and flashing I had never seen before, nor have I since. This sudden change of the leafless woods to glowing silver was, like the great aurora spoken of for years, and is one of the most beautiful of the many pictures that enriches my life. And besides, the great shows there were thousands of others, even in the coldest weather, manifesting the utmost fineness and tenderness of beauty, and affording noble compensation for hardship and pain. One of the most striking of the winter sounds was the loud roaring and rumbling of the ice on our lake from it shrinking and expanding with the changes of the weather. The fishermen who were catching Pickerel said that they had no luck when this roaring was going on above the fish. I remember how frightened we boys were when, on one of our New Year holidays, we were taking a walk on the ice and heard for the first time the sudden rumbling roar beneath our feet, and running on ahead of us, creaking and whooping, as if all the ice eighteen or twenty inches thick was breaking. In the neighborhood of our Wisconsin farm there were extensive swamps, consisting in great part of a thick sod of very tough kerricks roots covering thin, watery lakes of mud. They originated in glacier lakes that were gradually overgrown. This sod was so tough that oxen with loaded wagons could be driven over it without cutting down through it, although it was a float. The carpenters who came to build our framehouse, noticing how the sedges sunk beneath their feet, said that if they should break through they would probably be well on their way to California before touching bottom. On the contrary all these lake basins are shallow as compared with their width. When we went into the Wisconsin woods there was not a single wheel track or cattle track. The only man-made road was an Indian trail along the Fox River between Portage and Pukwaki Lake. Of course the deer, foxes, badgers, coons, skunks, and even the squirrels had well beaten tracks from their dens and hiding places in thickets, hollow trees, and the ground. But they did not reach far and but little noise was made by the soft-footed travelers in passing over them, only a slight rustling and swishing among fallen leaves and grass. Corduroy and the swamps formed the principal part of road-making among the early settlers for many a day. At these annual road-making gatherings opportunity was offered for discussion of the news, politics, religion, war, the state of the crops, comparative advantages of the new country over the old, and so forth. But the principal opportunities recurring every week were the hours after Sunday church services. I remember hearing long talks on the wonderful beauty of the Indian corn, the wonderful melons so wondrous fine for a slope on a body on hot days, their contempt for tomatoes so fine to look at with their sunny colors and so disappointing in taste, the miserable cucumbers the Yankee bodies ate, though tasteless as rushes, the character of the Yankees, etc. Then there were long discussions about the Russian war, news of which was eagerly gleaned from Greeley's New York Tribune, the great battles of the Alma, the charges at Balaklava and Inkerman, the Siege of Sebastopol, the military genius of Toad Laban, the character of Nicholas, the character of the Russian soldier, his stubborn bravery, who for the first time in history withstood the British bayonet charges, the probable outcome of the terrible war, the fate of Turkey, and so forth. Very few of our old country neighbors gave much heed to what are called spirit wrappings. On the contrary, they were regarded as a sort of slight of hand humbug. Some of these spirits seemed to be stout, able-bodied fellows, judging by the weights they lift and the heavy furniture they bang about. But they do no good work that I know of, never saw wood, grind corn, cook, feed the hungry, or go to the help of poor anxious mothers at the bed-sides of their sick children. I noticed, when I was a boy, that it was not the strongest characters who followed so-called mediums. When a wrapping storm was at its height in Wisconsin, one of our neighbors, an old Scotchman remark, their pure, silly, medium bodies may gang to the devil with their wrappings spirits, for they do no good, and I think the devil's their father. Although in the spring of 1849 there was no other settler within a radius of four miles of our Fountain Lake farm, in three or four years almost every quarter-section of government land was taken up, mostly by enthusiastic home-seekers from Great Britain, with only here and there Yankee families from adjacent states who had come drifting indefinitely westward in covered wagons, seeking their fortunes like winged seeds, all alike striking root and gripping the glacial drift soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees, happy and hopeful, establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable wilderness. The axe and plow were kept very busy, cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs multiplied, barns and corn-cribs were filled up, and man and beast were well fed. A schoolhouse was built, which was used also for a church, and in a very short time the new country began to look like an old one. Comparatively few of the first settlers suffered from serious accidents. One of our neighbors had a finger shot off, and on a bitter frosty night had to be taken to a surgeon in Portage in a sled drawn by slow-plotting oxen to have the shattered stump dressed. Another fell from his wagon and was killed by the wheel passing over his body. An acre of ground was reserved and fenced for graves, and soon consumption came to fill it. One of the saddest instances was that of a Scotch family from Edinburgh, consisting of a father, son, and daughter, who settled on eighty acres of land within a half mile of our place. The daughter died of consumption the third year after their arrival. The son, one or two years later, and at last the father, followed his two children. Thus sadly ended bright hopes and dreams of a happy home in rich and free America. Another neighbor, I remember, after a lingering illness died of the same disease in midwinter, and his funeral was attended by the neighbors in Slays during a driving snowstorm when the thermometer was fifteen or twenty degrees below zero. The great white plague carried off another of our near neighbors, a fine Scotchman, the father of eight promising boys, when he was only about forty-five years of age. Most of those who suffered from this disease seemed hopeful and cheerful up to a very short time before their death. But Mr. Reed, I remember, on one of his last visits to our house, said, with brave resignation, I know that never more in this world can I be well, but I must submit. I must just submit. One of the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that of a poor, feeble-minded man, whose brother, a sturdy blacksmith and preacher, etc., was a very hard taskmaster. Poor, half-witted Charlie was kept steadily at work, although he was not able to do much, for his body was about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right use of an axe, and when he was set to chopping down trees for firewood, he feebly hacked and chipped round and round them, sometimes spending several days in nibbling down a tree that a beaver might have nod down in half the time. Occasionally, when he had an extra large tree to chop, he would go home and report that the tree was too tough and strong for him, and that he could never make it fall. Then his brother, calling him a useless creature, would fell it with a few well-directed strokes and leave Charlie to nibble away at it for weeks, trying to make it into stovewood. The brawny blacksmith-minister punished his feeble brother without any show of mercy for every trivial offense or mistake or pathetic little shortcoming. All the neighbors pitted him, especially the women, who never missed an opportunity to give him kind words, cookies, and pie. Above all, they bestowed natural sympathy on the poor imbecile, as if he were an unfortunate, motherless child. In particular, his nearest neighbors, Scotch Highlanders, warmly welcomed him to their home, and never worried in doing everything that tender sympathy could suggest. To those friends he ran away at every opportunity. But after years of suffering from overwork and punishment his feeble health failed, and he told his Scotch friends one day that he was not able to work any more or do anything that his brother wanted him to do, that he was beaten every day and that he had come to thank them for their kindness and to bid them good-bye, for he was going to drown himself in Meers Lake. Oh, Charlie, Charlie, they cried. You mustn't talk that way. Cheer up. You'll soon be stronger. We all love you. Cheer up. Cheer up. And always come here whenever you need anything. Oh, no, he pathetically replied. I know you love me. But I can't cheer up anymore. My heart's gone, and I want to die. Next day, when Mr. Anderson the carpenter, whose house was on the west shore of our lake, was going to a spring, he saw a man wade out through the rushes and lily-pads and throw himself forward into deep water. This was poor Charlie. Fortunately Mr. Anderson had a skiff close by, and as the distance was not great, he reached the broken-hearted imbecile in time to save his life, and after trying to cheer him took him home to his brother. But even this terrible proof of despair failed to soften the latter. He seemed to regard the attempted suicide simply as a crime calculated to bring the reproach of the neighbors upon him. One morning, after receiving another beating, Charlie was set to work chopping fireward in front of the house, and after feebly swinging his axe a few times, he pitched forward on his face and died on the woodpile. The unnatural brother then walked over to the neighbor who had saved Charlie from drowning, and after talking on ordinary affairs, crops, the weather, etc., said in a careless tone, I have a little job, a carpenter, work for you, Mr. Anderson. What is it, Mr.? I want you to make a coffin. A coffin? said the startled carpenter, who was dead. Charlie, he coolly replied. All the neighbors were in tears over the poor child man's fate, but, strange to say in all that excessively law-abiding neighborhood, none was bold enough or kind enough to break the blacksmith's jaw. The mixed lot of settlers around us offered a favorable field for observation of the different kinds of people of our own race. We were swift to note the way they behaved, the differences in their religion and morals, and in their ways of drawing a living from the same kind of soil under the same general conditions, how they protected themselves from the weather, how they were influenced by new doctrines and old ones seen in new lights in preaching, lecturing, debating, bringing up their children, etc., and how they regarded the Indians, those first settlers and owners of the ground that was being made into farms. I well remember my father's discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr. George Mayor, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the soil. Mr. Mayor remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the unfortunate Indians, children of nature, living on the natural products of the soil, hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small cornfields on the most fertile spots, were now being robbed of their lands and pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood. Father replied that surely it could never have been the intention of God to allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it forever in unproductive wilderness, while Scotch and Irish and English farmers could put it to so much better use, where an Indian required thousands of acres for his family, those acres in the hands of industrious God-fearing farmers, would support ten or a hundred times more people in a far worthier manner, while at the same time helping to spread the gospel. Mr. Mayor urged that such farming as our first immigrants were practicing was in many ways rude and full of mistakes of ignorance. Yet, rude as it was and ill-tilled as were most of our Wisconsin farms, but unskilled inexperienced settlers who had been merchants and mechanics and servants in the old countries, how should we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and farms such as they were, making use of the same argument that God could never have intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre as we did? And I well remember thinking that Mr. Mayor had the better side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, whatever the final outcome might be, it was at this stage of the fight only an example of the rule of might with but little or no thought for the right or welfare of the other fellow if he were the weaker, that they should take who had the power and they should keep who can, as Wordsworth makes the marauding Scottish Highlanders say. Many of our old neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves into their graves years before their natural dying days in getting a living on a quarter section of land and vaguely trying to get rich, while bread and rain might have been serenely won on less than a fourth of this land and time gained to get better acquainted with God. I was put to the plow at the age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part of the plowing. It was hard work for so small a boy. Nevertheless, as good plowing was exacted from me as if I were a man, and very soon I had to become a good plowman or rather plow-boy, none could draw a straighter furrow. For the first few years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree stumps that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick Reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself. It was dull hard work leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those tough oak and hickory stumps deep down below the crowns of the big roots. Some, though fortunately not many, were two feet or more in diameter. And, as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for long lines of zigzag fences. The trees that were tall enough and straight enough to afford one or two logs, ten feet long, were used for rails. The others, too knotty or cross-grained, were disposed of in log and cordwood fences. Making rails was hard work and required no little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night. Father was not successful as a rail splitter. After trying to work with me a day or two, he, in despair, left it all to me. I rather liked it, for I was proud of my skill and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stopped my growth and earned for me the title, Runt of the Family. In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came to our help, almost everything connected with wheat-raising abounded in trying work. Cradling in the long, sweaty dog-days, raking and binding, stacking, thrashing, and it often seemed to me that our fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was too closely connected with grave-digging. The staff of life, naturally beautiful, oftentimes suggested the grave-diggers spade. Men and boys, in those days, even women and girls were cut down while cutting the wheat. The fat folk grew lean and the lean leaner, while the rosy cheeks brought from Scotland and other cool countries across the sea faded to yellow like the wheat. We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry. The same was in great part true in making hay to keep the cattle and horses through the long winters. We were called in the morning at four o'clock and seldom got to bed before nine, making a broiling, seething day, seventeen hours long, loaded with heavy work, while I was only a small, stunted boy, and a few years later my brothers David and Daniel and my older sisters had to endure about as much as I did. In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights and dog mornings, when we arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the bathing suits of swimmers, and remain so all the long, sweltering days. In mowing and cradling, the most exhausting of all the farm-work, I made matters worse by foolish ambition in keeping ahead of the hired men. Never a warning word was spoken of the dangers of overwork. On the contrary, even when sick we were held to our tasks as long as we could stand. Once in harvest time I had the mumps and was unable to swallow any food except milk, but this was not allowed to make any difference while I staggered with weakness and sometimes fell headlong among the sheaves. Only once was I allowed to leave the harvest field when I was stricken down with pneumonia. I lay gasping for weeks, but the scotch are hard to kill and I pulled through. No physician was called for father was an enthusiast and always said and believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors. None of our neighbors was so excessively industrious as father, though nearly all of the scotch, English, and Irish worked too hard, trying to make good homes and to lay up money enough for comfortable independence. Accepting small garden patches, few of them had owned land in the old country. Here their craving land-hunger was satisfied and they were naturally proud of their farms and tried to keep them as neat and clean and well-tilled as gardens. To accomplish this without the means for hiring help was impossible. Flowers were planted about the neatly kept log or frame houses. Barnyards, granaries, etc. were kept in about as neat order as the homes and the fences and cornrows were rigidly straight. But every uncut weed distressed them, so also did every ungathered ear of grain and all that was lost by birds and gophers and this over-carefulness bred endless work and worry. As for money, for many a year there was precious little of it in the country for anybody. Eggs sold at six cents a dozen in trade and five-cent calico was exchanged at twenty-five cents a yard. Wheat brought fifty cents a bushel in trade. To get cash for it before the portage railroad was built it had to be hauled to Milwaukee a hundred miles away. On the other hand food was abundant. Eggs, chickens, pigs, cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, garden vegetables of the best and wonderful melons as luxuries. No other wild country I have ever known extended a kinder welcome to poor immigrants. On the arrival in the spring a log house could be built. A few acres plowed, the virgin sod planted with corn, potatoes, etc., and enough raised to keep a family comfortably the very first year. And wild hay for cows and oxen grew in abundance on the numerous meadows. The American settlers were wisely content with smaller fields and less of everything, kept indoors during excessively hot or cold weather, rested when tired, went off fishing and hunting at the most favorable times and seasons of the day and year, gathered nuts and berries, and in general tranquilly accepted all the good things the fertile wilderness offered. After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the fountain-like farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses, after all this had been victoriously accomplished and we had made out to escape with life, father bought a half section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward, and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking, chopping, grubbing, stump digging, rail splitting, fence building, barn building, house building, and so forth. By this time I had learned to run the breaking plow. Most of these plows were very large, turning furrows from eighteen inches to two feet wide, and were drawn by four or five yoke of oxen. They were used only for the first plowing in breaking up the wild sod woven into a tough mass, chiefly by the cord-like roots of perennial grasses, reinforced by the taproots of oak and hickory bushes called grubs, some of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in diameter. In the hardest plowing on the most difficult ground, the grubs were said to be as thick as the hare on a dog's back. If in good trim, the plow cut through and turned over these grubs as if the century old wood were soft, like the flesh of carrots and turnips. But if not in good trim, the grubs promptly tossed the plow out of the ground. A stout Highland Scott, our neighbor, whose plow was in bad order and who did not know how to trim it, was vainly trying to keep it in the ground by main strength. While his son, who was driving and merrily whipping up the cattle, would cry encouragingly, hold her in, Father, hold her in. But how in the devil can I hold her in when she'll no stop in? His perspiring Father would reply, gasping for breath between each word. On the contrary, with the share and colter sharp and nicely adjusted, the plow, instead of shying at every grub and jumping out, ran straight ahead without need of steering or holding, and gripping the ground so firmly that it could hardly be thrown out at the end of the furrow. Our breaker turned a furrow two feet wide, and on our best land where the sod was toughest, held so firm a grip that at the end of the field my brother, who was driving the oxen, had to come to my assistance in throwing it over on its side, to be drawn around the end of the landing, and it was all I could do to set it up again. But I learned to keep that plow in such trim that after I got started on a new furrow, I used to ride on the crossbar between the handles with my feet resting comfortably on the beam, without having to steady or steer it in any way on the whole length of the field, unless we had to go around a stump, for it sod through the biggest grubs without flinching. The growth of these grubs was interesting to me, when an acorn or hickory nut had sent up its first season's sprout a few inches long, it was burned off in the autumn grass fires, but the root continued to hold on to life, forming a callus over the wound, and sent up one or more shoots the next spring. Next autumn these new shoots were burned off, but the root and calloused head, about level with the surface of the ground, continued to grow and send up more new shoots, and so on, almost every year, until very old, probably far more than a century, while the tops, which would naturally have become tall, broad-headed trees, were only mere sprouts, seldom more than two years old. Thus the ground was kept open like a prairie, with only five or six trees to the acre, which had escaped the fire by having the good fortune to grow on a bare spot at the door of a fox or badger den, or between straggling grass tufts wide apart on the poorest sandy soil. The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forests. As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass fires, the grubs grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through them, and every trace of the sunny openings vanished. We called our second farm Hickory Hill, from its many fine hickory trees, and the long, gentle slope leading up to it. Compared with Fountain Lake Farm, it lay high and dry. The land was better, but it had no living water, no spring or stream or meadow or lake. A well ninety feet deep had to be dug, all except the first ten feet or so, in fine-grained sandstone. When the sandstone was struck, my father, on the advice of a man who had worked in mines, tried to blast the rock, but from lack of skill the blasting went on very slowly, and father decided to have me do all the work with mason's chisels, a long, hard job with a good deal of danger in it. I had to sit cramped in a space about three feet in diameter, and wearily chip-chip with heavy hammer and chisels from early morning until dark, day after day, for weeks and months. In the morning father and David lowered me in a wooden bucket by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from the night before, then went away to the farm work and left me until noon, when they hoisted me out for dinner. After dinner I was promptly lowered again. The four noons, accumulation of chips, hoisted out of the way, and I was left until night. One morning after the dreary bore was about eighty feet deep, my life was all but lost in deadly choke-damp, carbonic acid gas that had settled at the bottom during the night. Instead of clearing away the chips as usual when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and forth and began to sink under the poison. Father alarmed that I did not make any noise, shouted. What's keeping you so still? To which he got no reply. Just as I was settling down against the side of the wall, I happened to catch a glimpse of a branch of a bur oak tree which leaned out over the mouth of the shaft. This suddenly awakened me, and to father's excited shouting I feebly murmured, Take me out! But when he began to hoist he found I was not in the bucket. And in wild alarm shouted, Get in, get in the bucket, and hold on, hold on! Somehow I managed to get into the bucket, and that is all I remembered until I was dragged out violently gasping for breath. One of our near neighbors, a stone mason and miner by the name of William Duncan, came to see me, and after hearing the particulars of the accident he solemnly said, Well, Johnny, it's God's mercy that you're alive. Many a companion of mine I have seen dead with choke-damp, but none that I ever saw or heard of was so near to death in it as you were, and escaped without help. Mr. Duncan taught Father to throw water down the shaft to absorb the gas, and also to drop a bundle or brush of hay attached to a light rope, dropping it again and again to carry down pure air and stir up the poison. When, after a day or two, I had recovered from the shock, Father lowered me again to my work, after taking the precaution to test the air with a candle and stir it up well with a brush and hay bundle. The weary hammer-and-chisel chipping went on as before, only more slowly, until ninety feet down, when at last I struck a fine, hardy gush of water. Constant dropping wears away stone, so does constant chipping, while at the same time wearing away the chipper. Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink it straight and plumb, and I did, and built a fine-covered top for it, and swung two iron-bound buckets in it, from which we all drank for many a day. The honeybee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several years past ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the honeybee into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history. This sweet, humming creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is now distributed over the greater part of the continent, filling countless hollows in rocks and trees with honey, as well as the millions of hives prepared for them by honey farmers, who keep and tend their flocks of sweet-winged cattle, as shepherds keep sheep, a charming employment, like directing sunbeams, as Thoreau says. The Indians called the honeybee the white man's fly, and though they had been long acquainted with several species of bumblebees that yielded more or less honey, how gladly surprised they must have been when they discovered that in the hollow trees where before they had found only coons or squirrels they found swarms of brown flies with fifty or even a hundred pounds of honey sealed up in beautiful cells. With their keen hunting senses they, of course, were not slow to learn the habits of the little brown immigrants and the best methods of tracing them to their sweet homes, however well hidden. During the first few years none were seen on our farm, though we sometimes heard fathers hired men talking about lining bees. None of us boys ever found a bee-tree or tried to find any until about ten years after our arrival in the woods. On the Hickory Hill farm there is a ridge of moraine material, rather dry but flowery, with golden rods and asters of many species, upon which we saw bees feeding in the late autumn, just when their hives were fullest of honey, and it occurred to me one day that I was of age and my own master that I must try to find a bee-tree. I made a little box about six inches long and four inches deep and wide, bought half a pound of honey, went to the golden rod hill, swept a bee into the box, and closed it. The lid had a pane of glass in it so I could see when the bee had sucked its fill and was ready to go home. At first it groped around trying to get out, but smelling the honey it seemed to forget everything else, and while it was feasting I carried the box and a small, sharp-pointed stake to an open spot where I could see about me, fixed the stake in the ground and placed the box on the flat top of it. When I thought that the little feaster must be about full I opened the box, but it was in no hurry to fly. It slowly crawled up to the edge of the box, lingered a minute or two cleaning its legs that had become sticky with honey, and when it took wing, instead of making what is called a bee-line for home, it buzzed around the box and minutely examined it as if trying to fix a clear picture of it in its mind so as to be able to recognize it when it returned for another load. Then circled around at a little distance as if looking for something to locate it by. I was the nearest object, and the thoughtful worker buzzed in front of my face and took a good stare at me, and then flew up to the top of an oak on the side of the open spot in the center of which the honey box was. Keeping a keen watch, after a minute or two of rest or wing cleaning, I saw it fly in wide circles around the tops of the trees nearest the honey box, and, after apparently satisfying itself, make a bee-line for the hive. Looking end-wise on the line of flight, I saw that what is called a bee-line is not an absolutely straight line, but a line in general straight made of many slight wavering lateral curves. After taking as true a bearing as I could, I waited and watched. In a few minutes, probably ten, I was surprised to see that bee arrived at the end of the outlinging limb of the oak mentioned above, as though that was the first point it had fixed in its memory to be dependent on in retracing the way back to the honey box. From the treetop it came straight to my head, then straight to the box, entered without the least hesitation, filled up, and started off after the same preparatory dressing and taking of bearings as before. Then I took particular pains to lay down the exact course so I would be able to trace it to the hive. Before doing so, however, I made an experiment to test the worth of the impression I had that the little insect found the way back to the box by fixing telling points in its mind. While it was away I picked up the honey box and set it on the stake a few rods from the position it had thus far occupied, and stood there watching. In a few minutes I saw the bee arrive at its guide mark, the overlending branch on the treetop, and thence came bouncing down right to the spaces in the air which had been occupied by my head and the honey box, and when the cunning little honey-gleaner found nothing there but empty air, it whirled round and round as if confused and lost, and although I was standing with the open honey box within fifty or sixty feet of the former feasting spot, it could not, or at least did not, find it. Now that I had learned the general direction of the hive, I pushed on in search of it. I had gone, perhaps a quarter of a mile when I caught another bee, which, after getting loaded, went through the same performance of circling round and round the honey box, buzzing in front of me and staring me in the face to be able to recognize me. But as if the adjacent trees and bushes were sufficiently well known, it simply looked around at them and bolted off without much dressing, indicating I thought that the distance to the hive was not great. I followed on and very soon discovered it in the bottom log of a cornfield fence, but some lucky fellow had discovered it before me and robbed it. The robbers had chopped a large hole in the log, taken out most of the honey, and left the poor bees late in the fall when winter was approaching to make haste to gather all the honey they could from the latest flowers to avoid starvation in the winter. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of the Story of my Boyhood and Youth This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Sue Anderson The Story of my Boyhood and Youth by John Muir Chapter 7 Knowledge and Inventions Hungry for Knowledge Borrowing Books Paternal Opposition Snatched Moments Early Rising Proves a Way Out of Difficulties The Seller Workshop Inventions And Early Rising Machine Novel Clocks Hygrometers, etc. A Neighbor's Advice I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it, though I had the rules by heart. But when I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge, and persuaded Father, who was willing enough to have me study provided my farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the beginning in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start for the harvest and hay fields, accomplishing more without a teacher in a few scraps of time than in years in school before my mind was ready for such work. Then in succession I took up algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and made some little progress in each, and reviewed grammar. I was fond of reading, but Father had brought only a few religious books from Scotland. Fortunately several of our neighbors had brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden from Father's eye. Among these were Scott's novels, which, like all other novels, were strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus's Wars of the Jews and D'Obignet's History of the Reformation, and I tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch's Lives, which, as I told him, everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book. But he would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham, bread, and anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwards neighborhood, making a stir or something like phrenology and spirit wrappings, which were as mysterious in their attacks as influenza. He then thought it possible that Plutarch might be turned to account on the food question by revealing what those old Greeks and Romans ate to make them strong, and so at last we gained our glorious Plutarch. Dick's Christian philosopher, which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might venture to read in the open, trusting that the word Christian would be proof against its cautious condemnation, but Father balked at the word philosopher and quoted from the Bible a verse which spoke of philosophy falsely so-called. I then ventured to speak in defense of the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of the most useful kinds of philosophy. Yes, we can, he said with enthusiasm. The Bible is the only book human beings can possibly require throughout all the journey from earth to heaven. But how, I contended, can we find the way to heaven without the Bible? And how, after we grow old, can we read the Bible without a little helpful science? Just think, Father, you cannot read your Bible without spectacles, and millions of others are in the same fix, and spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics. Oh, he replied, perceiving the drift of the argument, there will always be plenty of worldly people to make spectacles. To this I stubbornly replied with a quotation from the Bible with reference to the time coming when all shall know the Lord from the least even to the greatest, and then who will make the spectacles. But he still objected to my reading that book, calling me a contomacious quibbler too fond of disputation, and ordered me to return it to the accommodating owner. I managed, however, to read it later. On the food question, Father insisted that those who argued for a vegetable diet were in the right because our teeth showed plainly that they were made with reference to fruit and grain and not for flesh like those of dogs and wolves and tigers. He therefore promptly adopted a vegetable diet and requested Mother to make the bread from graham flour instead of bolted flour. Mother put both kinds on the table and meat also to let all the family take their choice. And while Father was insisting on the foolishness of eating flesh, I came to her help by calling Father's attention to the passage in the Bible which told the story of Elijah the Prophet, who, when he was pursued by enemies who wanted to take his life, was hidden by the Lord by the book Cherith and fed by ravens, and surely the Lord knew what was good to eat, whether bread or meat, and, on what I asked, did the Lord feed Elijah on vegetables or graham bread? No, he directed the ravens to feed his prophet on flesh. The Bible, being the sole rule, Father at once acknowledged that he was mistaken. The Lord never would have sent flesh to Elijah by the ravens if graham bread were better. I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton, was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure, and I became anxious to know all the poets and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible. Within three or four years I was the proud possessor of parts of Shakespeare's, Milton's, Calpher's, Henry Kirky White's, Campbell's, and Ackenside's works, and quite a number of other seldom-read nowadays. I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm and smack my lips over favorite lines. But there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings, only a few stolen minutes now and then. Father's strict rule was, straight to bed immediately after family worship, which in winter was usually over by eight o'clock. I was in the habit of lingering in the kitchen with a book and candle after the rest of the family had retired, and considered myself fortunate if I got five minutes reading before Father noticed the light and ordered me to bed. And ordered that, of course, I immediately obeyed. But night after night I tried to steal minutes in the same lingering way, and how keenly precious those minutes were few nowadays can know. Father failed perhaps two or three times in a whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes, magnificent golden blocks of time, long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods. One evening, when I was reading Church history, Father was particularly irritable, and called out with hope-killing emphasis, John, go to bed. Must I give you a separate order every night to get you to go to bed? Now I will have no irregularity in the family. You must go when the rest go, and without my having to tell you. Then, as an afterthought, as if judging that his words and tone of voice were too severe, for so pardonable an offense as reading a religious book, he unwarily added, If you will read, get up in the morning and read, you may get up in the morning as early as you like. That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of this wonderful indulgence. And next morning, to my joyful surprise, I awoke before Father called me. A boy sleeps soundly after working all day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chill-blanes, enormously eager to see how much time I had won, and when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen, I found that it was only one o'clock. I had gained five hours, almost half a day. Five hours to myself, I said five huge solid hours. I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours. In the glad tumultuous excitement of so much suddenly acquired time wealth, I hardly knew what to do with it. I first thought of going on with my reading, but the zero weather would make a fire necessary, and it occurred to me that Father might object to the cost of firewood that took time to chop. Therefore I prudently decided to go down-seller and begin work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I had invented. Next morning I managed to get up at the same gloriously early hour, and though the temperature of the cellar was a little below the freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle, the millwork went joyfully on. There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar, a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that Father had brought from Scotland, but no saw accepting a coarse crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine toothed saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset that cut the hardest wood smoothly. I also made my own bra dolls, punches, and a pair of compasses out of wire and old files. My workshop was immediately under Father's bed, and the filing and tapping in making cogwheels, journals, cams, etc., must no doubt have annoyed him. But with the permission he had granted in his mind and doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one o'clock, he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word. I did not vary more than five minutes from one o'clock all winter, nor did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious. It was a grand triumph of willpower, over cold and common comfort and work weariness, in abruptly cutting down my ten hours allowance of sleep to five. I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy, like Tamashanta I was glorious, over all the ills of life victorious. Father, as was customary in Scotland, gave thanks and asked a blessing before meals, not merely as a matter of form and decent Christian manners, for he regarded food as a gift derived directly from the hands of the Father in heaven. Therefore every meal to him was a sacrament requiring conduct and attitude of mind not unlike that befitting the Lord's supper. No idle word was allowed to be spoken at our table, much less any laughing or fun or storytelling. When we were at the breakfast table about two weeks after the great golden time discovery, Father cleared his throat preliminary, as we all knew, to say in something considered important. I feared that it was to be on the subject of my early rising, and dreaded the withdrawal of the permission he had granted on account of the noise I made. But still hoping that, as he had given his word that I might get up as early as I wished, he would, as a scotchman, stand to it, even though it was given in an unguarded moment and taken, in a sense, unreasonably far-reaching. The solemn sacramental silence was broken by the dreaded question. John, what time is it when you get up in the morning? About one o'clock, I replied, in a low, meek, guilty tone of voice. And what kind of a time is that, getting up in the middle of the night and disturbing the whole family? I simply reminded him of the permission he had freely granted me to get up as early as I wished. I know it, he said, in an almost agonized tone of voice. I know I gave you that miserable permission, but I never imagined that you would get up in the middle of the night. To this I cautiously made no reply, but continued to listen for the heavenly one o'clock call, and it never failed. After completing myself setting sawmill, I dammed one of the streams in the meadow and put the mill in operation. This invention was speedily followed by a lot of others, water wheels, curious door locks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer, and automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a lamp lighter and fire lighter, an early or late rising machine, and so forth. After the sawmill was proved and discharged from my mind, I happened to think it would be a fine thing to make a timekeeper which would tell the day of the week and the day of the month, as well as strike like a common clock and point out the hours, also to have an attachment whereby it could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at my hour in the morning, also to start fires, light lamps, etc. I had learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book, but with this exception I knew nothing of timekeepers, for I had never seen the insight of any sort of clock or watch. After long brooding the novel clock was at length completed in my mind and was tried and found to be durable and to work well and look well before I had begun to build it in wood. I carried small parts of it in my pocket to whittle at when I was out at work on the farm, using every spare or stolen moment within reach without fathers knowing anything about it. In the middle of summer when harvesting was in progress the novel time machine was nearly completed. It was hidden upstairs in a spare bedroom where some tools were kept. I did the making and mending on the farm, but one day at noon when I happened to be away father went upstairs for a hammer or something and discovered the mysterious machine back of the bedstead. My sister Margaret saw him on his knees examining it, and at the first opportunity whispered in my ear, John, father, saw that thing you're making upstairs. None of the family knew what I was doing, but they knew very well that all such work was frowned on by father and kindly warned me of any danger that threatened my plans. The fine invention seemed doomed to destruction before its time ticking commenced, though I thought it handsome, had so long carried it in my mind, and, like the nest of burns we mousy, it had cost me many a weary whittling nibble. When we were at dinner several days after the sad discovery, father began to clear his throat to speak, and I feared the doom of martyrdom was about to be pronounced on my grand clock. John, he inquired, what is that thing you are making upstairs? I replied in desperation that I didn't know what to call it. What? You mean to say you don't know what you are trying to do? Oh, yes, I said, I know very well what I am doing. What then is the thing for? It's for a lot of things, I replied, but getting people up early in the morning is one of the main things it is intended for. Therefore it might perhaps be called an early-rising machine. After getting up so extravagantly early, all the last memorable winter, to make a machine for getting up, perhaps still earlier, seemed so ridiculous that he very nearly laughed. But after controlling himself and getting command of a sufficiently solemn face and voice, he said severely, Do you not think it is very wrong to waste your time on such nonsense? No, I said meekly. I don't think I'm doing any wrong. Well, he replied, I assure you I do, and if you were only half as zealous in the study of religion as you are in contriving and whittling these useless nonsensical things, it would be infinitely better for you. I want you to be like Paul, who said that he desired to know nothing among men but Christ and him crucified. To this I made no reply, gloomily believing my fine machine was to be burned, but still taking what comfort I could in realizing that anyhow I had enjoyed inventing and making it. After a few days finding that nothing more was to be said and that Father, after all, had not had the heart to destroy it, all necessity for secrecy being ended, I finished it in the half hours that we had at noon and set it in the parlor between two chairs, hung moraine boulders that had come from the direction of Lake Superior on it for weights, and set it running. We were then hauling grain into the barn. Father, at this period, devoted himself entirely to the Bible and did no farm work whatever. The clock had a good loud tick, and when he heard it strike, one of my sisters told me that he left his study, went to the parlor, got down on his knees, and carefully examined the machinery, which was all in plain sight, not being enclosed in a case. This he did repeatedly and evidently seemed a little proud of my ability to invent and whittle such a thing, though careful to give no encouragement for anything more of the kind in future. But somehow it seemed impossible to stop, inventing and whittling faster than ever, I made another hickory clock shaped like a scythe to symbolize the scythe of Father Time. The pendulum is a bunch of arrows symbolizing the flight of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy oak snag showing the effect of time, and on the snath is written, All flesh is grass. This, especially the inscription, rather pleased Father, and, of course, Mother and all my sisters and brothers admired it. Like the first it indicates the days of the week and month starts fires and beds at any given hour and minute, and, though made more than fifty years ago, is still a good timekeeper. My mind still running on clocks I invented a big one, like a town clock, with four dials, with the time figures so large they could be read by all our immediate neighbors, as well as ourselves, when at work in the fields, and on the side next the house the days of the week and month were indicated. It was to be placed on the peak of the barn roof, but, just as it was all but finished, Father stopped me, saying that it would bring too many people around the barn. I then asked permission to put it on the top of a black oak tree near the house. Studying the large main branches, I thought I could secure a sufficiently rigid foundation for it, while the trimmed sprays and leaves would conceal the angles of the cabin required to shelter the works from the weather, and the two-second pendulum, fourteen feet long, could be snugly encased on the side of the trunk. Nothing about the grand, useful timekeeper, I argued, would disfigure the tree, for it would look something like a big hox nest. But that, he objected, would draw still bigger, bothersome, trampling crowds about the place, for who ever heard of anything so queer as a big quack on the top of a tree. So I had to lay aside its big wheels and cams, and rest content with the pleasure of inventing it, and looking at it in my mind, and listening to the deep solemn throbbing of its long two-second pendulum with its two old axes back to back for the bob. One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod, about three feet long and five-eighths of an inch in diameter, that had formed part of a wagon box. The expansion and contraction of this rod was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron. The pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a small counterweight, so that the slightest change in the length of the rod was instantly shown on a dial, about three feet wide multiplied about thirty-two thousand times. The zero point was gained by packing the rod in wet snow. The scale was so large that the big black hand on the white-painted dial could be seen distinctly and the temperature red while we were plowing in the field below the house. The extremes of heat and cold caused the hand to make several revolutions. The number of these revolutions was indicated on a small dial marked on the larger one. The thermometer was fastened on the side of the house and was so sensitive that when anyone approached it within four or five feet the heat radiated from the observer's body caused the hand of the dial to move so fast that the motion was plainly visible, and when he stepped back the hand moved slowly back to its normal position. It was regarded as a great wonder by the neighbors and even by my own all-bible father. Boys are fond of the books of travelers, and I remember that one day, after I had been reading Mungo Park's travels in Africa, Mother said, Well, John, maybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day. Father overheard her and cried out in solemn deprecation. Oh, Anne, don't have put such notions in the laddie's head. But at this time there was precious little need of such prayers. My brothers left the farm when they came of age, but I stayed a year longer, loath to leave home. Mother hoped I might be a minister some day. My sisters that I would be a great inventor. I often thought I should like to be a physician, but I saw no way of making money and getting the necessary education, accepting as an inventor. So as a beginning I decided to try to get into a big shop or factory and live a while among machines, but I was naturally extremely shy and had been taught to have a poor opinion of myself, as of no account. Though all our neighbors encouragingly called me a genius, sure to rise in the world. When I was talking over plans one day with a friendly neighbor, he said, Now John, if you wish to get into a machine shop, just take some of your inventions to the State Fair, and you may be sure that as soon as they are seen, they will open the door of any shop in the country for you. You will be welcomed everywhere. And when I doubtingly asked if people would care to look at things made of wood, he said, Made of wood, made of wood, what does it matter what they're made of, when they are so out and out original, there's nothing else like them in the world. That is what will attract attention, and besides, there might be handsome things anyway to come from the backwoods.