Charlie Bell, The Waif of Elm Island

by Elijah Kellogg

The next morning Ben sent Charlie after the widow Hadlock, who came on to take care of her daughter and grandchild.

There were other incidents connected with the burn of a less pleasing nature. Charlie had a very large hen, that the widow Hadlock had given him, which, having stolen her nest, was sitting among the bushes on eighteen eggs, and, too faithful to leave her trust, was burned to a crisp on her nest. Charlie grieved much as he looked upon the remains of his hen, and counted over the eggs, the chickens from which he was hoping to have raised as late ones to winter, that he might send the earlier ones to the West Indies; but he consoled himself with the thought that his turnip-patch was spared, and growing finely.

All along the shore of the island the line of cliff was fringed with a mixed growth of white birch, maple, spruce, and red oak, contrasting beautifully with the ragged and perpendicular cliffs which had been spared by Ben as a shelter to the land from the easterly winds, and more than all for the beauty of their appearance. He took great delight in the spring, when pulling along the shore, in looking upon the masses of light-green foliage that covered the birches, and fell over the rocks.

These were now all consumed; and the rocks, shorn of moss, stood out white and naked in the sun. The willows and alders that fringed the brook were gone; the trunks of the elms and that of the great maple scorched, and the grass all around the house black as a coal. All over the land were blackened stumps and stubs, from which the smoke rose, and among whose roots the fires were smouldering. The beauty of the landscape had vanished, and desolation came in its stead.

“Father,” cried Charlie, moved almost to tears as he gazed upon the scene, “will my maple die, and the elms, and the great yellow birch at the brook, mother thinks so much of?”

“No, Charlie, they are only singed on the outside; there was not power enough in burning grass to heat the roots, as though they had stood in the woods among the brush; and the trees on the bank will be replaced by others, and perhaps handsomer ones.”

They now went to rolling and piling; in anticipation of this Sally had made them two suits apiece of tow-cloth, which they wore without shirts. The fire had not consumed the bodies of many of the large trees: some of these they used to make the fence of; the rest they cut up and hauled together with the oxen, and piled them up in great piles, and set them on fire, till they consumed the whole. As they were compelled to put their shoulders and breasts against these logs to roll them up, they were covered with smut from head to foot. They could not sit down in a chair without smutting it all over; and their faces were in streaks of white and black, where the perspiration ran down and washed away the smut. So, when they came to their meals, they just took off their tow suits, and got into the brook and washed themselves, and then washed their clothes, and spread them in the sun to dry, and put on another suit; part of the time they took their dinner in the field. Rover followed them round, rooting under the stumps for worms, and once in a while would shove his nose on a hot coal, which would make him run away squealing.

This smutty and laborious job being over, land fenced, and logs burned up, Ben sowed half of it with winter rye, reserving the other to plant with corn in the spring.

The grain must now in some way be covered; but Ben had no harrow to cover it with; besides, the ground was dotted with stumps, whose great roots stuck out in every direction, and no common harrow would have worked. He cut down a scrubby spruce, and trimming off the limbs within six or eight inches of the trunk, sharpened the points of them; he then hitched the oxen to this hedge-hog, as he called it, and hauled it over the ground, thus scratching the earth over the grain. When Charlie saw this, he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

“I should think it was a hedge-hog,” said he; “I wonder what the steward of his highness the Duke of Bedford would say to that.”