University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.

Difficulties began to melt away like frosty rime
after this. Some were removed, but to many we became
habituated in a far shorter time than I could
have imagined possible. A carpenter constructed a
narrow flight of board-steps which really seemed magnificent
after the stick-ladder. The screws came before
the bed-steads were quite spoiled, and the arrival
of my bureau—the unpacking of the box among whose
multifarious contents appeared the coffee-mill, the
smoothing-irons, the snuffers, gave more real delight
than that of any case of splendid Parisian millinery
that ever drew together a bevy of belles at Mrs.—'s
show-rooms. I never before knew the value of a portable

desk, or realized that a bottle of ink might be
reckoned among one's treasures.

Our preparations for residence were on a very limited
scale, for we had no idea of inhabiting the loggery more
than six weeks or two months at farthest. Our new
dwelling was to be put up immediately, and our arrangements
were to be only temporary. So easily are people
deluded!

The Montacute mill was now in progress, and had
grown (on paper,) in a short time from a story and a
half to four stories; its capabilities of all sorts being
proportionably increased. The tavern was equally fortunate,
for Mr. Mazard had undertaken its erection
entirely on his own account, as a matter of speculation,
feeling, he said, quite certain of selling it for double its
cost whenever he should wish. The plan of the public-house
was the production of his teeming brain, and exhibited
congenial intricacies; while the windows resembled
his own eyes in being placed too near together,
and looking all manner of ways. Several smaller
buildings were also in progress, and for all these workmen
at a high rate of wages were to be collected and
provided for.

I could not but marvel how so many carpenters had
happened to “locate” within a few miles of each other
in this favoured spot; but I have since learned that a
plane, a chisel, and two dollars a day make a carpenter
in Michigan.

Mill-wrights too are remarkably abundant; but I
have never been able to discover any essential difference
between them and the carpenters, except that they
receive three dollars per diem, which, no doubt, creates
a distinction in time.

Our mill-wright was a little round-headed fellow with
a button nose, a very Adonis, in his own eyes, and most
aptly named Puffer, since never did a more consequential
dignitary condescend to follow a base mechanical
calling. His statements, when he condescended to
make any, were always given with a most magisterial
air; and no suggestion, however skilfully insinuated or
gently offered, was ever received without an air of insulted
dignity, and a reiteration of his own conviction
that it was probable he understood his business.

It is to be ascribed to this gentleman's care and accuracy
that Mr. Clavers has since had the satisfaction
of appearing as defendant in several suits at law,
brought by those of his neighbours whose property had
been doubled in value by the erection of the mill, and
who therefore thought they might as well see what
else they could get, to recover the value of sundry
acres of wet marsh made wetter by the flowing back
of the pond, while Mr. Puffer's calculations and levels
prove most satisfactorily (on paper) that the pond
had no business to flow back so far, and that therefore
malice itself could ascribe no fault to his management.

But to return. Our own dwelling was to be built at
the same time with all those I have mentioned; and
materials for the whole were to be brought by land carriage
from two to thirty miles. To my inexperienced
brain, these undertakings seemed nothing less than
gigantic. I used to dream of the pyramids of Egypt,
and the great wall of China, and often thought, during
my waking hours, of the “tower on Shinar's plain,” and
employed myself in conjectural comparisons between
the confusion which punished the projectors of that

edifice, and the difficulties which beset the builders of
Montacute.

“No brick come yet, sir! Dibble couldn't get no
white wood lumber at I—, (thirty miles off,) so he
stopt and got what lime there was at Jones's; but they
hadn't only four bushels, and they wouldn't burn again
till week after next; and that'ere sash that came from
—is all of three inches too large for the window
frames; and them doors was made of such green stuff,
that they won't go together no how.”

“Well, you can go on with the roof surely!”

“Why, so we could; but you know, sir, oak-shingle
wouldn't answer for the mill, and there's no pine shingle
short of Detroit.”

“Can't the dwelling-house be raised to-day then?”

“Why, we calc'lated to raise to-day, sir; but that
fellow never came to dig the cellar.”

“Go on with the blacksmith's shop, then, since nothing
else can be done.”

“Yes, sir, certainly. Shall we take that best white
wood siding? for you know the oak siding never came
from Tacker's mill.”

“Send Thomson for it, then.”

“Well, Thomson's best horse is so lame that he
can't use him to-day, and the other is a-drawin' timber
for the dam.”

“Let John go with my horses.”

“John's wife's sick, and he's got your horses and
gone for the doctor.”

But if I should fill pages with these delays and disappointments,
I should still fail to give any idea of the
real vexations of an attempt to build on any but the

smallest scale in a new country. You discover a
thousand requisites that you had never thought of, and
it is well if you do not come to the angry conclusion
that every body is in league against you and your
plans. Perhaps the very next day after you have by
extra personal exertion, an offer of extra price, or a
bonus in some other form, surmounted some prodigious
obstacle, you walk down to survey operations
with a comfortable feeling of self-gratulation, and find
yourself in complete solitude, every soul having gone
off to election or town meeting. No matter at what
distance these important affairs are transacted, so fair
an excuse for a ploy can never pass unimproved; and
the virtuous indignation which is called forth by any
attempt at dissuading one of the sovereigns from exercising
“the noblest privilege of a freeman,” to forward
your business and his own, is most amusingly provoking.

I once ventured to say, in my feminine capacity
merely, and by way of experiment, to a man whose
family I knew to be suffering for want of the ordinary
comforts:

“I should suppose it must be a great sacrifice for
you, Mr. Fenwick, to spend two days in going to election.”

The reply was given with the air of Forrest's William
Tell, and in a tone which would have rejoiced
Miss Martineau's heart—“Yes, to be sure; but ought
not a man to do his duty to his country?”

This was unanswerable, of course. I hope it consoled
poor Mrs. Fenwick, whose tattered gown would
have been handsomely renewed by those two days'
wages.

As may be conjectured from the foregoing slight
sketch of our various thwartings and hinderances, the
neat framed house which had been pictured on my
mind's eye so minutely, and which I coveted with such
enthusiasm, was not built in a month, nor in two, nor
yet in three;—but I anticipate again.

The circumstance of living all summer, in the same
apartment with a cooking fire, I had never happened
to see alluded to in any of the elegant sketches of
western life which had fallen under my notice. It was
not until I actually became the inmate of a log dwelling
in the wilds, that I realized fully what “living all
in one room” meant. The sleeping apparatus for the
children and the sociable Angeline, were in the loft;
but my own bed, with its cunning fence of curtains;
my bureau, with its “Alps on Alps” of boxes and
books; my entire cooking array; my centre-table,
which bore, sad change! the remains of to-day's dinner,
and the preparations for to-morrow, all covered
mysteriously under a large cloth, the only refuge from
the mice: these and ten thousand other things, which
a summer's day would not suffice me to enumerate,
cumbered this one single apartment; and to crown the
whole was the inextinguishable fire, which I had entirely
forgotten when I magnanimously preferred living
in a log-house, to remaining in Detroit till a house
could be erected. I had, besides the works to which I
have alluded, dwelt with delight on Chateaubriand's
Atala, where no such vulgar inconvenience is once
hinted at; and my floating visions of a home in the
woods were full of important omissions, and always in
a Floridian clime, where fruits serve for vivers.

The inexorable dinner hour, which is passed sub
silentio in imaginary forests, always recurs, in real
woods, with distressing iteration, once in twenty-four
hours, as I found to my cost. And the provoking people
for whom I had undertaken to provide, seemed to
me to get hungry oftener than ever before. There
was no end to the bread that the children ate from
morning till night—at least it seemed so; while a tin
reflector was my only oven, and the fire required for
baking drove us all out of doors.

Washing days, proverbial elsewhere for indescribable
horrors, were our times of jubilee. Mrs. Jennings,
who long acted as my factotum on these occasions, always
performed the entire operation, al fresco, by the
side of the creek, with

I feel much indebted to Cowper for having given a
poetical grace to the arrangement. “The shady shadow
of an umbrageous tree” (I quote from an anonymous
author) served for a canopy, and there the bony
dame generally made a pic-nic meal, which I took care
to render as agreeable as possible, by sending as many
different articles as the basket could be persuaded to
receive, each contained in that characteristic of the
country, a pint bowl.

But, oh! the ironing days! Memory shrinks from
the review. Some of the ordinary household affairs
could be managed by the aid of a fire made on some
large stones at a little distance from the house; and
this did very well when the wind sat in the right quarter;

which it did not always, as witness the remains of
the pretty pink gingham which fell a sacrifice to my
desire for an afternoon cup of coffee. But the ironing
and the baking were imperious; and my forest Hecate,
who seemed at times to belong to the salamander tribe,
always made as much fire as the stick-chimney, with
its crumbling clay-lining, would possibly bear. She
often succeeded in bringing to a white heat the immense
stone which served as a chimney-back, while
the deep gaps in the stone hearth, which Alice called
the Rocky Mountains, were filled with burning coals
out to the very floor. I have sometimes suspected that
the woman loved to torment me, but perhaps I wrong
her. She was used to it, I dare say, for she looked like
one exsiccated in consequence of ceaseless perspiration.

When the day declined, and its business was laid aside,
it was our practice to walk to and fro before the door,
till the house had been thoroughly cooled by the night-air;
and these promenades, usually made pleasant by
long talks about home, and laughing conjectures as to
what—and—would say if they could see
our new way of life, were frequently prolonged to a late
hour. And to this most imprudent indulgence we
could not but trace the agues which soon prostrated
most of us.

We had, to be sure, been warned by our eastern
friends that we should certainly have the ague, do what
we might, but we had seen so many persons who had
been settled for years in the open country, and who
were yet in perfect health, that we had learned to
imagine ourselves secure. I am still of the opinion
that care and rational diet will enable most persons to

avoid this terrible disease; and I record this grave
medical view of things for the encouragement and instruction
of such of my city friends as may hereafter
find themselves borne westward by the irresistible current
of affairs; trusting that the sad fate of their predecessors
will deter them from walking in the open air
till ten o'clock at night without hat or shawl.