102 OLD-TIME
It sprung up quickly, and produced an abundant
crop.

After the wheat was sown, they built substantial
log cabins on their farms in the midst of theclearing.
“Didn’t they leave a single tree to shade their houses?”
some one wonders. No; they were too wise to do
that. The first blast of wind might have blown them
over and perhaps crushed their little cabins. Forest
trees do not send out their roots widely and bracingly,
like those which grow in open land, and they do
not stand stoutly alone. The cabins completed, the
clearings were left in the care of one man, while the
rest went back to the home State for their families.
It was not safe to leave the wheat fields unwatched ;
and with all the care, very likely the bears got half
of the crops.

The food for the family during the first year was
principally wild game and wheat. The pigs and
sheep and calves which they had laboriously driven
from the old homes were altogether too precious to
be killed until they were sure of others. They often

COOKERY.

“improved” farm; that is, a small clearing had been
made upon it a few years before, and an unfinished
framed house built, also a log stable, I think, around
which had been stacked the wild hay cut in the clear-
ing. Oh, how they shivered in that unfinished house
that first winter, though Mr. Whitney kept his ham-
mers and saws flying—ceiling and battening the
cracks; for he was a notable carpenter. It is said
“ pride will keep one warm,” but their pride in their
“board house” was not sufficient to keep them half
as warm as their neighbors were in their snug, cosey
log cabins. Did you never live inalog house? Then
I wish you could for just one winter; you would
never pity the early settlers again, simply on the score
of their houses. They were, perhaps, a trifle too
dark in the day time, since the logs could not be cut
through too often for window space; but they were
very warm. The settlers, to be sure, built framed
houses as soon as possible, both because they could
be made more roomy and because they liked to build
“for good.” <A log house was erected for temporary

 

THE VERY

boiled their wheat, and corn too after they began to
raise it, whole, or else cracked it in a mortar; for the
grist-mill might be twenty or thirty miles away, and of
course they went to it as seldom as possible.

But Mr. Whitney brought his family to an

EARLIEST SETTLERS,

accommodation without foundation stones; conse-
quently sagged, sunk, and leaned, and seldom lasted
many years. Madame Whitney’s house, like all of
that date, had an immense chimney—larger than
her bedroom, with small fireplaces in the “square