University of Virginia Library

36. CHAPTER XXXVI.

When we first took our delighted abode in the
“framed house,” a palace of some twenty by thirty
feet, flanked by a shanty kitchen, and thatched with
oak shingles,—a sober neighbour, who having passed
most of his life in the country, is extremely philosophical
on the follies of civilization, took my husband
to task on the appearance of the ghost of a departed parlour
carpet, which he said was “introducing luxury.”
Whether from this bad example, I cannot tell, but it is
certain that our neighbours are many of them beginning
to perceive that carpets “save trouble.” Women
are the most reasonable beings in the world; at least,
I am sure nobody ever catches a woman without an
unanswerable reason for anything she wishes to do.
Mrs. Micah Balwhidder only wanted a silver tea-pot,
because, as all the world knows, tea tastes better out of
silver; and Mrs. Primrose loved her crimson paduasoy,

merely because her husband had happened to say it
became her.

Of the mingled mass of our country population, a
goodly and handsome proportion—goodly as to numbers,
and handsome as to cheeks and lips, and thews and
sinews, consists of young married people just beginning
the world; simple in their habits, moderate in their
aspirations, and hoarding a little of old-fashioned
romance, unconsciously enough, in the secret nooks of
their rustic hearts. These find no fault with their
bare loggeries. With a shelter and a handful of furniture
they have enough. If there is the wherewithal
to spread a warm supper for “th' old man” when he
comes in from work, the young wife forgets the long,
solitary, wordless day, and asks no greater happiness
than preparing it by the help of such materials and
such untensils as would be looked at with utter contempt
in a comfortable kitchen; and then the youthful pair sit
down and enjoy it together, with a zest that the
“orgies parfaites” of the epicure can never awaken.
What lack they that this world can bestow? They
have youth, and health, and love and hope, occupation
and amusement, and when you have added “meat,
clothes, and fire,” what more has England's fair young
queen? These people are contented, of course.

There is another class of settlers neither so numerous
nor so happy; people, who have left small farms in
the eastward states, and come to Michigan with the
hope of acquiring property at a more rapid rate. They
have sold off, perhaps at considerable pecuniary disadvantage
the home of their early married life; sacrificed
the convenient furniture which had become necessary

to daily comfort, and only awake when it is too
late, to the fact that it kills old vines to tear them from
their clinging-places. These people are much to be
pitied, the women especially.
Woman's little world is overclouded for lack of the old
familiar means and appliances. The husband goes to
his work with the same axe or hoe which fitted his
hand in his old woods and fields, he tills the same soil,
or perhaps a far richer and more hopeful one—he
gazes on the same book of nature which he has read
from his infancy, and sees only a fresher and more
glowing page; and he returns to his home with the
sun, strong in heart and full of self-gratulation on the
favourable change in his lot. But he finds the home-bird
drooping and disconsolate. She has been looking
in vain for the reflection of any of the cherished features
of her own dear fire-side. She has found a
thousand deficiencies which her rougher mate can
scarce be taught to feel as evils. What cares he if
the time-honoured cupboard is meagerly represented by
a few oak-boards lying on pegs and called shelves?
His tea-equipage shines as it was wont—the biscuits
can hardly stay on the brightly glistening plates. Will
he find fault with the clay-built oven, or even the tin
“reflector?” His bread never was better baked.
What does he want with the great old cushioned rocking-chair?
When he is tired he goes to bed, for he is
never tired till bed-time. Women are the grumblers
in Michigan, and they have some apology. Many of
them have made sacrifices for which they were not at
all prepared, and which detract largely from their
every day stores of comfort. The conviction of good
accruing on a large scale does not prevent the wearing
sense of minor deprivations.

Another large class of emigrants is composed of people
of broken fortunes, or who have been unsuccesful
in past undertakings. These like or dislike the country
on various grounds, as their peculiar condition may
vary. Those who are fortunate or industrious look at
their new home with a kindly eye. Those who learn
by experience that idlers are no better off in Michigan
than elsewhere, can find no terms too virulent in which
to express their angry disappointment. The profligate
and unprincipled lead stormy and uncomfortable lives
any where; and Michigan, now at least, begins to
regard such characters among her adopted children,
with a stern and unfriendly eye, so that the few who
may have come among us, hoping for the unwatched
and unbridled license which we read of in regions
nearer to the setting sun, find themselves marked and
shunned as in the older world.

As women feel sensibly the deficiencies of the “salvage”
state, so they are the first to attempt the refining
process, the introduction of those important nothings
on which so much depends. Small additions to the
more delicate or showy part of the household gear are
accomplished by the aid of some little extra personal
exertion. “Spinning-money” buys a looking-glass
perhaps, or “butter-money” a cherry table.
Eglantines and wood-vine, or wild-cucumber, are

sought and transplanted to shade the windows. Narrow
beds round the house are bright with Balsams and
Sweet Williams, Four o'clocks, Poppies and Marigolds;
and if “th' old man” is good natured, a little
gate takes the place of the great awkward bars before
the door. By and bye a few apple-trees are set out;
sweet briars grace the door yard, and lilacs and currant-bushes;
all by female effort—at least I have never
yet happened to see it otherwise where these improvements
have been made at all. They are not all accomplished
by her own hand indeed, but hers is the
moving spirit, and if she do her “spiriting gently,” and
has anything but a Caliban for a minister, she can
scarcely fail to throw over the real homeliness of her
lot something of the magic of that Ideal which has
been truly sung—
This shadowy power, or power of shadows is the “arch-vanquisher
of time and care” every where; but most
of all needed in the waveless calm of a strictly woodland
life, and there most enjoyed. The lovers of “unwritten
poetry” may find it in the daily talk of our
rustic neighbours—in their superstitions—in the remedies
which they propose for every ill of humanity, the
ideal makes the charm of their life as it does that of all
the world's, peer and poet, wood-cutter and serving-maid.

After allowing due weight to the many disadvantages
and trials of a new-country life, it would scarce be
fair to pass without notice the compensating power of
a feeling, inherent as I believe, in our universal nature,
which rejoices in that freedom from the restraints of
pride and ceremony which is found only in a new country.
To borrow from a brilliant writer of our own, “I
think we have an instinct, dulled by civilization, which
is like the caged eaglet's, or the antelope's that is reared
in the Arab's tent; an instinct of nature that scorns
boundary and chain; that yearns to the free desert;
that would have the earth like the sky, unappropriated
and open; that rejoices in immeasurable liberty of foot
and dwelling-place, and springs passionately back to its
freedom, even after years of subduing method and spirit-breaking
confinement!”

This “instinct,” so beautifully noticed by Willis, is
what I would point to as the compensating power of
the wilderness. Those who are “to the manor born”
feel this most sensibly, and pity with all their simple
hearts the walled-up denizens of the city. And the
transplanted ones—those who have been used to no
forests but “forests of chimneys,” though “the parted
bosom clings to wonted home,” soon learn to think nature
no step-mother, and to discover many redeeming
points even in the half-wild state at first so uncongenial.

That this love of unbounded and unceremonious
liberty is a natural and universal feeling, needs no
argument to show; I am only applying it on a small
scale to the novel condition in which I find myself in
the woods of Michigan. I ascribe much of the placid

contentment, which seems the heritage of rural life,
to the constant familiarity with woods and waters—
To the harmony which the Creator has instituted
between the animate and inanimate works of His
hands.

Authorities crowd upon me, and I must be allowed
to close my chapter with a favourite paragraph from
Hazlitt.