thirteen pigs out of a cornfield when they did not want to go? Did you ever hive bumble-bees in a jug? Did you ever plug up the hole in a hornet's nest with a corn-cob? If you never did, you do n't know very much about life in the backwoods. I wonder that I did not die when I was a baby. I never expected to live to be a man; but now, since I am through with it, things do not seem so bad. There is, after all, an element of delightfulness about hardship, but only after you get by it for a time. This is so, I suppose, because the higher reason of it does not appear while passing through it. In the midst of hardship or sorrow, we are too close to understand. After ten or twenty years we see things in perspective. We have no place for sorrows while we are in them; but they pass by and we remain; and God shows them to us afterwards in such splendid relief that we not unwillingly read into them our life lessons. We endure the stints of poverty, we suffer and groan and weep, and afterwards laughter breaks through our tears. I was born on a bleak, blustery night in March, in the year eighteen hundred and -no matter when. I have no personal recollection of the event, anyway. Having certain reasons for beginning thus, I simply vouch for the fact that I was born, and that is sufficient for all the purposes of these narratives. Dates are sometimes embarrassing. Our cabin stood on a cleared knoll of four acres, just west of a town called Hazelgreen. The prairie skirted us to the south, coming up to the foot of the knoll like the arm of a great sea, and opening to the eye a stretch of vision for more than twenty miles, with only an occasional tree to break the view. There was heavy timber on the east, and also on the west, following the bed of Honey Creek to the Wabash fifteen miles away. To the north, the timber, except an occasional break made by a small clearing, extended forty miles, with only blazed paths, and narrow, rugged roadways through it. It was a wilderness vaster than the prairie south of us. The Indians, as a body, had fled before the approach of the pale face, and had left him in peaceable possession of a heritage of unmeasured riches. It was no uncommon thing, however, for an aged, wandering red-skin to return to these the hunting grounds of his youth, as if it had gone from his memory that the white man had taken it from him; and he would only appear to come to a realization of the fact when he would approach the cabins and clearings; and then, in a lonesome way, turn into the woods and be gone. What strange be- · ings these old Indians were! mysterious their movements! How silent and They seemed as if they were dying broken-hearted that the richest hunting-grounds they ever knew were wrested from them forever. A lone Indian was known to the settlers to be harmless. The Delawares were most acquainted with this region, and a number of their older men were rather familiar objects to the settlers. Their returning became finally the occasion of a tragedy. In cold blood four of them were killed in the space of a month; and it provoked threatenings of a general massacre from the Delaware tribe. It was a cowardly deed, evidently perpetrated by some white man for revenge, or from natural hate. The Delawares were promised full redress, if the guilty party could be found. The settlers finally fixed on a comer from the south, who had furnished them with a two-sided clew against himself. One was the statement that his family had been the victims of Indian treachery; and the other the unwary statement that whenever he saw an Indian, he shut one eye, and they never met again. This man, John Gleaso, shortly afterward disappeared. What became of him, no one ever knew certainly. It was said by the knowing ones that he was spotted to the Delawares, and they did the rest. Hazelgreen consisted at first of one shanty, These in which lived one man and one woman. two were the joint owners of a barrel of whisky and a milch-cow. In this family life-or partnership arrangement, I do not know which-the woman managed the whisky, and the man the cow. This sort of division of the labor may have been for the reason that if the man should manage the whisky, he would drink up all the profits. The more satisfactory explanation is, that the woman was the man of the house. This man did chores and small jobs. After a time there was added to this first essential equipment of a trading post in a new country, a small stock of groceries, to supply the little necessities of the settlers. This re-enforcement of stock was never more than a makeshift-a sort of bait and blind to draw trade to the liquor business. began as a whisky town, it lived town, it died as a whisky town. Hazelgreen as a whisky Whisky sell ing was always the uppermost business in it. So it did quite an amount to blast and damn the community. Our cabin was a jack-oak structure, sixteen by eighteen, with a seven-foot ceiling. It had white-oak chink-timber-the heart pieces of a board tree. It was daubed with yellow clay, mixed without lime; and the mortar was put on in such profuse fashion, that the clay filling the bark of the jack-oak logs gave it a most grotesque appearance. The gables were of like material with the walls, the logs being sloped at the ends, and each one made shorter so as to receive the roof-poles and make the slant. The roof-poles reached the length of the roof, and answered the double purpose of rafter and sheeting to receive the four-foot clapboards. On the top of these boards were laid other roof-poles, withed to those underneath at the ends-this to hold the boards in place. It was a roof made without nails or stroke of hammer. There were two doors, each made of fourteen-inch poplar-plank which had been cut with a whip-saw. Each door was made of two planks, battened and hung on wooden hinges. The memory of those hinges makes my flesh creep to this day. Of all the noises in this time of strange noises, these hinges made the worst. It did not seem to oc |