A Son of the Middle Border | Page 3

fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls.
I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin, stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it a marsh filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night. Beyond was a wooded mountain.
This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass, and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these!
The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass," she said, "you will surely sink out of sight." At night this teeming bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond only the door yard and the road seemed safe for little men and even there I wished my mother to be within immediate call.
My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could not enlist among the first volun teers, though he was deeply moved to do so, till his land was paid for but at last in 1863 on the very day that he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the roll and went back to his wife, a soldier.
I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why. My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots and besides his name was already on the roll, therefore he went away to join Grant's army at Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist neighbors "to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere sentiment ; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.
My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting, nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far away but into my sub-conscious ear her voice sank, and the words Grant, Lincoln, Sherman, "furlough," "mustered out," ring like bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic years.
Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war.
I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so commingled with later impressions, experiences which came long after that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined, but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete.
Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my training military, for my father brought back from his two years campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a soldier.
He became naturally the dominant figure in my hori zon, and his scheme of discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children.
I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under mother's government, for she was too jolly, too tender-hearted, to engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of punish ment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us, for he often