A Man and a Woman | Page 9

over an inland sea, the nearest shore not a score of miles
away, and filtered through aromatic forests to your senses, an invisible
elixir, exhilarating, without a headache as the price? Have you seen the
tiger-lilies and crimson Indian-tobacco blossoms flashing in the
lowlands? Have you trapped the mink and, visiting his haunts, noticed
there the old blue crane flitting ever ahead of you through dusky
corridors, uncanny, but a friend? Have you--but there are a thousand
things!
If you have not seen or known or felt all these fair things--so jumbled
together in the allusion here, without a natural sequence or thought or
reason or any art--if you have not owned them all and so many others
that may not here be mentioned, then you have missed something of the
gifts and glories of growth in a new land. Such experience comes but to

one generation. But one generation grows with the conquest, and it is a
great thing. It is man-making.
And from the east came more hewers of wood, not drawers of water,
and the axe swung all around, and new clearings were made and earlier
ones broadened, and where fireweed first followed, the burning of the
logs there were timothy and clover, though rough the mowing yet, and
the State was "settled." Roads through the woods showed wagon-ruts,
now well defined; houses were not so far apart, and about them were
young orchards. The wild was being subjugated. The tame was growing.
The boy was growing with it.
There was nothing particularly novel in the manner of this youth's
development, save that, as he advanced in years, he became almost a
young Indian in all woodcraft, and that the cheap, long, single-barreled
shotgun, which was his first great personal possession, became, in his
skilled hands, a deadly thing. Wild turkey and ruffed grouse, and
sometimes larger game, he contributed to the family larder, and he had
it half in mind to seek the remoter west when he grew older, and
become a mighty hunter and trapper, and a slaughterer of the Sioux.
The Chippewas of his own locality were scarcely to be shot at. Those
remaining had already begun the unpretending life most of them live
to-day, were on good terms with everybody, tanned buckskin
admirably, and he approved of them. With the Sioux it was quite
different. He had read of them in the weekly paper, which was now a
part of progress, and he had learned something of them at the district
school--for the district school had come, of course. It springs up in the
United States after forests have been cut away, just as springs the wheat
or corn. And the district school was, to the youth, a novelty and a vast
attraction. It took him into Society.
Through forest paths and from long distances in each direction came
the pupils to this first school of the region, and there were perhaps a
score of them in all, boys and girls, and the teacher was a fair young
woman from the distant town. The school-house was a structure of a
single room, built in the wood, and squirrels dropped nuts upon its roof
from overhanging boughs and peeped in at the windows, and

sometimes a hawk would chase a fleeing bird into the place, where it
would find a sure asylum, but create confusion. Once a flock of quail
came marching in demurely at the open door, while teacher and pupils
maintained a silence at the pretty sight. And once the place was cleared
by an invasion of hornets enraged at something. That was a great day
for the boys.
The studies were not as varied as in the cross-roads schools to-day.
There was the primer, and there were a few of the old Webster
spelling-books, but, while the stories of the boy in the apple tree and
the overweening milkmaid were familiar, the popular spelling-book
was Town's, and the readers were First, Second, Third and Fourth, and
their "pieces" included such classics as "Webster's Reply to Hayne" and
"Thanatopsis," and numerous clever exploits of S. P. Willis in blank
verse. Davie's Arithmetic was dominant, and, as for grammar,
whenever it was taught, Brown's was the favorite. There was, even then,
in the rural curriculum the outlining of that system of the common
schools which has made them of this same region unexcelled elsewhere
in all the world. There were strong men, men who could read the future,
controlling the legislation of some of the new States.
The studies mentioned, and geography were the duties now in hand,
and there was indifference or hopefulness or rivalry among those of the
little group as there is now in every school, from some new place in
Oklahoma to old Oxford, over seas. In all scholarship, it chanced