William Richardson, accumulating property by his trade, bought a piece of timber land every year, and let it lie. In the latter part of his life the rise in the value of this land made him affluent. At his decease this portion of his property fell to the sons, his wife having died some years before him, and the daughters receiving their portion in money. The shop remained as it was; Clem would have nothing touched. It was not, to be sure, the original log hovel; but it was the same forge, and the building stood on the same spot. The old pine stump still formed the anvil block, and the hammer fashioned from the andirons still lay on the anvil, just as his father had left it after his last day's work. There also were the tongs made from the legs of the kitchen tongs, and the sledge forged from the churn-drill.
After the war business revived, and there was a great demand for lumber. The Richardsons sold out at Portsmouth, returned to their native place, bought the old mill privilege, and went to lumbering. Strange to say, Clement Richardson and his wife, although retaining their simple and industrious habits, felt that they did not want their children to work as hard as they had; and going to the other extreme, while affording them all the advantages of education and culture their altered circumstances enabled them to bestow, trained them up in a way that rendered them in all matters of practical life absolutely helpless.
This, as our readers know, was the character of Rich when he entered college; he could scarcely tie his own shoes. The good fortune of stumbling upon Morton for a while roused the energies that lay buried beneath this effeminate training; but after separating from his mates, he relapsed gradually into his former habits.
Thus passed the first year after leaving college; but with the succeeding spring came something that, like to the shock of an earthquake, effectually roused Rich from his poetic reveries and visions of high art, rent with a rude hand the tissue of the dream-robe fancy had woven, and set him face to face with the bitter, stern realities of life.
Clement Richardson was naturally a prudent man, averse to incurring risk of any kind; but uninterrupted success in all his plans for thirteen years had rendered him sanguine. He found, soon after engaging in lumbering, that very little was to be realized from small operations; that, to accumulate, a person must either possess the capital and risk it, or hire money and run the risk of losing that. He and his brother, stimulated by the high price of lumber at that time, and intoxicated by good fortune in lesser adventures, hired money largely, and expended every dollar of their own in land and logs. They had a good drive, early in the spring the logs were in the booms, and the mills running night and day to manufacture them, in order to meet demands that were fast maturing. The price of lumber was still high, future prospects were most flattering, and the Richardsons felt that a fortune was within their grasp, when rain began to fall while the water was still almost at freshet pitch, and there was much snow in the woods at the head waters of the river.
Clement concealed his anxiety from his children, and in some measure from his wife, who, although she knew that great loss would follow the breaking of the booms, was utterly ignorant of the extent of her husband's liabilities and of the crisis at hand.
Directly after supper the two brothers went out. Rich occupied a good portion of the evening in reciting to his mother and sisters a poem he had spent weeks in composing. After the children had retired, Lucy Richardson sat sewing, wondering at the continued absence of her husband and his brother, and listening to the roar of water. At length there came a crash; she with difficulty suppressed a scream. In a few moments a servant came to tell her one of the mills had gone.
"Where is my husband, Henry?"