This constant employment of every moment of the waking hours contributed to impart to New Englanders a regard and method of life which is spoken of by many outsiders with contempt, namely, a closely girded and invariable habit of economy. Children brought up in this way knew the value of everything in the household, knew the time it took to produce it, for they had labored themselves, and they grew to take care of small things, not to squander and waste what they had been so long at work on. This, instead of being a thing to sneer at, is one of the very best elements in a community, one of the best securities of character. For sudden leaps to fortune are given to but few, and are seldom lasting, and the results of sudden inflations are more disastrous even to a community than to isolated individuals, as may be abundantly proved by the early history of Virginia. It was not meanness that made the wiry New England farmer so cautious and exacting in trade, when the pennies he saved sent his son through college. It was not meanness which made him refuse to spend money; he had no money to spend, and it was a high sense of honor that kept him from running in debt. It was not meanness which so justly ordered conditions and cared for the unfortunate that even in those days of horrible drunkenness often there would not be a pauper in the entire village. It has been a reproach that in some towns the few town poor were vendued out to be cared for; the mode was harsh in its wording, and unfeeling in method, but in reality the pauper found a home. I have known cases where the pauper was not only supported but cherished in the families to whose lot she fell.
CHAPTER XIV
TRAVEL, TRANSPORTATION, AND TAVERNS
Wherever the earliest colonists settled in America, they had to adopt the modes of travel and the ways of getting from place to place of their predecessors and new neighbors, the Indians. These were first—and generally—to walk on their own stout legs; second, to go wherever they could by water, in boats. In Maryland and Virginia, where for a long time nearly all settlers tried to build their homes on the banks of the rivers and bays, the travel was almost entirely by boats; as it was between settlements on all the great rivers, the Hudson, Connecticut, and Merrimac.
Between the large settlements in Massachusetts—Boston, Salem, and Plymouth—travel was preferably, when the weather permitted, in boats. The colonists went in canoes, or pinnaces, shaped and made exactly like the birch-bark canoes of the Canadian Indians to-day; and in dugouts, which were formed from hollowed pine-logs, usually about twenty feet long and two or three feet wide; both of these were made for them by the Indians. It was said that one Indian, working alone, felling the pine-tree by the primitive way of burning and scraping off the charred parts with a stone tool called a celt (for the Indians had no iron or steel axes), then cutting off the top in the same manner, then burning out part of the interior, then burning and scraping and shaping it without and within, could make one of these dugouts in three weeks. The Indians at Onondaga still make the wooden mortars they use in the same tedious way.
When the white men came to America in great ships, the Indians marvelled much at the size, thinking they were hollowed out of tree-trunks as were the dugouts, and wondered where such vast trees grew.
The Swedish scientific traveller, Kalm, who was in America in 1748, was delighted with the Indian canoes and dugouts. He found the Swede settlers using them constantly to go long distances to market. He said:—
"They usually carry six persons who however by no means must be unruly, but sit at the bottom of the canoe in the quietest manner possible lest the boat upset. They are narrow, round below, have no keel and may be easily overset. So when the wind is brisk the people make for the land. Larger dugouts were made for war-canoes which would carry thirty or forty savages."
These boats usually kept close to the shore, both in calm and windy weather, though the natives were not afraid to go many miles out to sea in the dugouts.
The lightness of the birch-bark canoe made it specially desirable where there were such frequent overland transfers. It was and is a beautiful and perfect expression of natural and wild life; as Longfellow wrote:—
"... the forest's life was in it,
All its mystery and magic,
All the lightness of the birch tree,
All the toughness of the cedar,
All the larch's supple sinews,
And it floated on the river
Like a yellow leaf in autumn."