Summerfield / or, Life on a Farm

by Day Kellogg Lee

Fabens was pleased with his neighbors, and warmly reciprocated the interest they took in him. There was old Moses Waldron, the first settler, an out-and-out backwoodsman; smart with an axe, sure with a gun, free with a bowl of metheglin, open in hospitality, and an enemy only to owls, and blackbirds, wolves, thieves, tories and the British. He chased the tories and redcoats in his dreams, and talked to himself while walking alone awake. The owls annoyed him sorely. Not because they killed his pretty chickens, but because there was so little of them beside their feathers, and their eyes were so monstrous white and large, and they had such a ghostly halloo. Whenever he caught an owl's hollow voice in ominous boomings from the woods, he stopped and cursed him, and cried, "Ah hoo, hoo, ah hoo-ah; ah hoo, you pesky torment! if I had you by the neck, I'd wring it for you, I'll warrant you I would, ah-hoo-ah!"

Aunt Polly Waldron was a match for her husband; and while she was an actual woman in chaste and single heart, in motherly loves, in the tenderest sympathies and most unselfish feelings, she was a large, square-shouldered and hard-handed woman; she could split oven-wood, hunt bees, skin deer, and hoe corn; and she loved to tell "how she shot a tory in the Revolution, who came while Moses was away in the wars, and fired their barn, and took her best feather-bed out door and ripped it, and scattered the feathers to the sky: how the tory whooped and keeled as she dropped him, and how three other tories and an Indian legged it like Jehu away."

Uncle Walter Mowry was younger by ten years than Mr. Waldron, and his wife Huldah was five years younger than he, and they were specimens of thrifty and noble, but uncultivated nature, such as we love to find in the backwoods, and such as furnish materials for the richest and finest city life. Uncle Walter was of a medium stature, a well-moulded face, and fair skin, and he was hardy as a bear and athletic as a panther. There was never a farmer who kept cleaner fields, or handsomer stake-and-rider fence than he; or had earlier corn, or a larger woodpile; yet he did love a hunt more dearly than a venison pie; he caught fish from pools where others received not a nibble; and he enjoyed a leisure day, and a feast, and a fine story.

Aunt Huldah was a little swarthy woman, weighing only ninety pounds at forty years of age; but she was free and generous, and all who had her heart and its overflowing love, had all, and there was nothing left of her. She had the whitest linens, the clearest maple sugar, and the smoothest and cleanest white maple floor in all the settlement; and she loved scrubbing and scouring as well as Uncle Walter loved hunting. A stranger would have thought her a real firer of a scold; but she was never in a passion; and Uncle Walter used to say, he found her the best, if anything, when seeming to scold the hardest, and she had that way of expressing her interest in him, and making her work go on more briskly.

There were Thomas Teezle and his wife, who were valued acquisitions to the settlement. Thomas was stocky and muscular, frank, fearless and free-hearted; and he kept a keen and ringing broad axe, and could hew a beam or a sleeper as straight as a bee-line.

There were Jacob Flaxman and his wife Phoebe, and they were cousins; and both had yellow hair and freckled faces; both weighed in one notch; both sang in one song; both craved a fine farm and happy home, and were prospered in their craving.

There was Abram Colwell, who gloried in never having cyphered beyond the rule of three, or read any book but his almanac through; but who was upright as an oak; shrewd as a black fox; hearty as a beaver, and jocund as a jay.

And there was Bela Wilson, a farmer, a chairmaker, a shoemaker, carpenter and blacksmith, all in one, as Uncle Walter declared; and while he was close and exacting in a bargain, and stinted in his gifts, he had many streaks of kindness, and added usefulness, honor, interest and life to the settlement.

And among these people Fabens found pleasure and good fortune. The summer that followed the date of his letter, was warm and fruitful, and he went forth clearing and planting with a forward heart; and when September came, he looked back on his labors with pride, and felt a sense of comfort and content, for the beginning he had made of a home. By dint of extreme diligence he made a larger clearing in the spring than he had hoped, and succeeded in planting it all to corn; and now in the autumn, he had a wide field, bearing the promise of a bountiful harvest.

But he had not expected increase without tax, nor joy without annoyance. His corn-hills supported a liberal yield of well-filled, glistening ears; but foreign feeders that had not planted, nor hoed, came in for a share of his abundance.