 | CHAPTER IV. Forest life |  |
4. CHAPTER IV.
But, if we would be happy, we must bring
Our buoyed hearts to a plain and simple school.
Percival.
Next to talking about ourselves, the pleasantest
thing is talking about our neighbors. This is a
fact which every body concedes in general, yet
nobody is willing to apply in particulars; so I trust
I shall secure a reputation for candor by confessing
that my foible (if I have one) is love of gossip.
I am no great tea-drinker, nor yet an immoderate
snuffer; I am not able to knit a stocking during a
ride of ten miles on a hard-trotting horse; nor have
I ever taken geese away from home to pick rather
than refuse an invitation for an afternoon visit. So
there are people that excel me in the true tokens
of gossipry,—yet I am a hopeful scholar. If we
should ever establish an “Order of the Golden
Cricket,” or any other sociable sisterhood, in these
parts, I shall be a candidate for secondary honors
at least. I know who will have the Grand Cross
and Collar.
Now, if there be a propensity in the feminine
nature on which it is barbarous to place any restriction,
it is this. What should we say of the
man who should rivet down the safety-valve of a
for all the mischiefs that might follow? Or of him
that should build a mill-dam, and omit the flood-gate?
Ought he not to pay for all the fences that
might be carried off by the consequent inundation?
My former sketches were of the safety-valve and
flood-gate kind. They were the overflowings of a
reservoir of new sights, new sounds, and new notions.
They wrote themselves, so to speak. They
were “First Impressions”—which, by the bye,
is the most fortunate title ever yet devised for a
book of travels. First impressions are the only
ones worth recording for the amusement or enlightenment
of those who stay at home; and they must
be arrested on the instant, or they lose their sparkle.
It is in vain, after new things have become familiar,
to attempt to make them amusing. The bead is
gone forever.
After all that is said of the influence of habit, I
was never fully aware of its power until after some
residence in the new country. I never knew or
believed that the oddest, most inconvenient, or even
odious customs, the most incorrect modes of speech,
and the most incongruous jumbling of all that
ought to be kept separate, could have become so
familiar as to be almost forgotten. I had supposed
that whatever might be the opposing influences
around us, our own views, and the imperious requisitions
of our habits, would continue to wage war
with every particular of the new life. Such a
it some of the characteristics of the final one:—
“a separation from all that has hitherto engaged or
delighted us; a change not only of the place, but
of the manner of our being; an entrance into a
state not only which we know not, but which perhaps
we have not faculties to know;”—yet it is
only while the novelty lasts that these things strike
us with that vividness, which prompts us to describe
them. At first nothing is more natural than
to think and speak of the contrasts that are shocking
us at every turn, but a few years' familiarity
with what we dislike makes it nearly indifferent.
As far as modes of speech are concerned, we find
ourselves much more likely to adopt unconsciously
the quaint and incorrect expressions that assail our
ears in daily intercourse, than to inspire our neighbors
with a desire for habits of greater correctness;
and after this assimilation takes place, we do not
recollect to describe what at first seemed so odd. I
confess myself to have become too much Westernized
to be a competent painter of Western peculiarities.
Still, there is enough to say; but, bless me!
when I attempt to draw fancy-pictures, bearing only
some general resemblance to particular classes of the
human family, I am horror-stricken to find myself
a Mephistopheles. Every creation of my not very
lively imagination instantly becomes a living, breathing,
and very angry reality. Shadows adopt substance,
unlucky potency of mine, by looking hideous, and
shaking their unkempt locks at me as if I were
really in league with the arch-enemy! What is to
be done in such a case? Can one hope to be
agreeable in such disagreeable company? Did
Damocles eat his dinner with his usual self-complacency
after he discovered the suspended sword?
Having in vain tried all my little power of exorcism
on these unquiet spirits, I take this opportunity
to declare that all the naughty and unpleasant
people—all the tattlers and mischief-makers,—all
the litigious,—all the quarrelsome,—all the expectorant,—all
the unneat,—all the unhandsome,
—have emigrated to Iowa, Wiskonsan, or Texas,
or some other far distant land, to this deponent
unknown; and that there is not—meo periculo—one
single specimen of any of these classes
remaining in this wide peninsula. So that any
description of such characters which I may hazard
in future must be mere phantoms of the brain, and
cannot have been drawn from real life within these
bounds. Some subjects being thus precluded, I
shall content myself with offering such general
sketches of life and its chances and changes, as
shall exempt me from any charge of being too correct
or too sincere; avoiding thus the sour glances
of the conscious and the critical, though at the expense
of some little amusement to my chosen
friend and constant ally, the reader.
Of the adventurous spirits who cast in their lot
with us at the beginning, few have been content
with our jog-trot rate of advancement. A large
proportion of this class have been, as we have said,
attracted by the alluring prospects held forth by
the “West,” and have started off at a tangent, determined
to see with their own eyes grass growing
higher than a giant's head, and fields of corn
through which a mounted horseman might gallop
unobserved. These and many other things of
similar character they went to see. They have
not come back to tell us what they did see; but
some of them who left their land under mortgage
having forgotten to send money to make the requisite
payments, we conclude they must have seen a
great deal that was very interesting, or they would
not have been so oblivious. Peace be with them!
Wiskonsan or Iowa will doubtless profit by our
loss, since states are nothing without men.
The successors of these original settlers (and some
of them have already had a succession of successors)
we, who have been here four or five years,
look upon as new people—mere mushrooms;—
and we are slow in admitting them to our confidence,
except they dress uncommonly well or own
more stock than usual. This of course alters the
case, for we are all apt to believe with the merchant-princes
of one of our great cities, that “the
mere possession of property necessarily implies
some kind of merit.” Fortunately our belief in this
since we have no reason to suspect that any of our
new neighbors got their cows or horses by piracy,
or even by slave-driving. They are emphatically
“nice people,” and present a sufficient variety of
characteristics; so that we think we shall like them
very well if they will stay long enough for our
present favorable impressions to take root.
Of outward changes, the tax-gatherer, as he
paces on his tall gray steed our roomy avenues,
can trace but few,—of public improvements still
fewer. Times of general discouragement, when
the entire spirit of the country is lowered by the
stagnation of commerce, and such depression of
prices that the labor of the husbandman becomes
an almost hopeless toil, are not those when what
is popularly termed public spirit is wont to be very
warmly evinced in any community, least of all in
those which, during the most favorable times, know
superfluity only by name. Smile not, kindest
reader, at this somewhat formal apology for the
homely and primitive aspect of our vicinity. We
are of much more importance in our own eyes than
we are in yours, and we choose not to have our
case considered an isolated instance, but rather as a
part of the great whole.
While the great tide of emigration was rolling
westward, its waves, though finding their limit far
beyond us, still added something in their course to
our population and our prosperity. But at present,
of household utensils,—bedsteads walling up the
sides,—a washing-tub turned up to serve as a seat
for the driver,—a bundle of window-sash sticking
out behind, surmounted by a new broom or two,—
pots and kettles dangling below,—bundles of beds
and bedding tied up in coverlets, enthroning children
of all the smaller sizes,—a rocking-chair
topping all,—we do not expect to see it make a
final stop in our Main Street. We know that it is
destined for the deep woods far beyond us, and we
conjecture that the stout farmer who guides the
whole cortège, including perhaps cattle, sheep, and
hogs, driven by the boys on foot, has tired of his
Michigan farm, and is going out to the “diggings”
in Illinois, Wiskonsan, or Iowa. He only stops
long enough at our hotel to refresh his weary
wife and children, and to buy provisions for a further
march, and then bravely sets forth again, to
eat and sleep in the woods as long as may be
necessary. If you should ask him why he thus
forsakes all that most of us think worth living for,
he would tell you perhaps that he thinks there is
more room at the West; that a poor man can get
along better where there is not so many folks; and
that he can get twice as much good land for his
boys where the country is quite new. If you ask
his wife how she likes the change, she will try
perhaps to put the best face on the matter, and say
that she hated to break up, but th' old man thought
of the more timid and gentle nature, (as there are
indeed many in this rough West,) she will answer
with silent tears, which however will be carefully
concealed from her husband. Such have indeed a
hard lot before them. But to return to ourselves.
Our school-house still serves all denominations
as a place of worship, and its walls, venerable with
the gathered blackness of two years, have had as
yet no taste of paint. The various lawsuits, to
which its location, construction, erection, and furnishing,
gave rise being still undecided, the building
remains an object of the first interest. The library
which ought to decorate its western wall is still
unpurchased, nor have I heard any thing lately said
of an appropriation for the purpose. Nor is there a
tree yet planted whose shade may soften to the
rising generation the fervors of the noon-spell. It
is sometimes a term of reproach among us in speaking
of a silly fellow, that he is “not half baked:”
our district scholars may all be wise, if baking
have any efficacy.
Various masters and mistresses have “swayed
the sceptre of the infant realm;” the men in winter,
the young ladies in summer;—alternating on
the interesting plan of the tenants of the weather-house.
I was proceeding to speak of the improvement
evident in the manners of the young hopes,
but that little rogue in the red and black striped
cap just then threw a snow-ball against my window,
at present.
One of the teachers—a fair, slender girl of
eighteen or thereabouts—was to every one an object
of peculiar interest. She was soft-voiced and
dark-eyed, with a most lady-like quietness of manner,
and a temper which could not be disturbed
even by a school. Her home was at no great distance,
and her parents, though highly respectable
and well-educated, found it not easy to make comfortable
provision for a very numerous family; so
Miranda, being the eldest, volunteered, for the meanest
conceivable stipend,—scarce more than sufficient
to furnish her own unpretending dress,—to
undertake the wearisome task of drilling lisping
tongues through the long hours of a sultry summer.
She soon began to fade. She was always cheerful;
—ever answering with a pleasant smile your questions
about her health, her decreasing waist, and
narrowing chest;—but she declined evidently and
rapidly. She had intervals of delusive hope; but
after months of suffering and heavenly resignation,
we had at last the melancholy task of arraying her
for the grave, and carrying her home to her father's
in her coffin. She came of a consumptive race,
they said, but I could not help fearing that confinement
to a sedentary employment, and the lack of
the ordinary amusements and gratifications of
youth, had some share in removing her so early.
I have seen so many heart-rending instances of a
who undertake such a difficult and trying office
while the constitution is yet unconfirmed.
If our dear young friend's life was a sad and
short one, her death at least was all light and love;
and like a dew-drop, first sparkling in the morning
sun and then exhaled by its beams, she seemed to
our watching eyes to be gradually absorbed in the
great Fountain of purity and blessedness; so gradually
that the change from an earthly to a heavenly
state was scarce perceptible. May her closing,
scene be ours!
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