How glad little Mitty was to see that bag of meal! and what a nice time she had of it that night, sitting on a little cricket before a blazing hickory fire, and eating the buttered cakes that her mother handed down to her from the table. Oh, you city children couldn't get up such a frontier appetite for your fricassees, and mince-pies, if you tried a lifetime.
"They didn't have any newspapers there."
Ah! there you have me! More especially as I had as lief go without my breakfast as without my newspaper; but, then, I can tell you, that there were things all the time happening there on the frontier, that many a newspaper editor would have given his scissors and easy chair to have got hold of, for his paper. I'll tell you about some.
One night Mitty lay in her little bed of straw and husks, almost asleep, when she heard her father at the door, singing out, "H-a-l-l-o-o! h-a-l-l-o-o!" as loud as ever he could; and then a faint voice, way off, caught it up, and echoed back, "H-a-l-l-o-o! h-a-l-l-o-o!" Then Mitty's father lit a great bright torch, and moved it, flaming, back and forth before the door; and in a little while a poor, weary, frightened traveler, who had got lost in the dark woods, heard the voice that had answered to his, and saw, by the torch, where to come to find Mr. Moore; and in less than an hour after, he was snoring away under Mr. Moore's roof, with a good, comfortable supper tucked under his ribs while the bears had to go without any.
Bears? Certainly!—I didn't mention the gentlemen before, for fear it would make your mother trouble when it came your bed-time; but, nevertheless, it is a naked fact that bears live on the frontier.
One day a woman came in to Mr. Moore's, crying and "taking on" in a most pitiful manner. Mitty couldn't understand (the woman sobbed so much) what it was all about; but she concluded that something special was to pay, because her mother let her brown bread all burn to a crisp in the oven, while she was listening to her. Then her mother ran out in the cornfield, with her cap strings all flying, after her father; and Mr. Moore dropped his hoe, ran to the house and caught up a great tin horn, and stood at the door, blowing with all his might; "Too—hoo—too—hoo—too—hoo;" and then Orphy Smith, the next neighbor, caught up his horn, and blew, too; and then the next, and the next; and, in a very short time, all the neighbors knew that Mr. Moore wanted them to come to his log house, just as fast as their horses legs could carry them.
So, in they flocked,—Orphy Smith, and Seth Jones, and Pete Parker, and Jesse Jenkins, and Eph. Ellet, and a whole host more; and Mitty's father told them that Desire Dibden's child (whose father had been killed by the Indians,) was lost in the woods; and that was enough to say;—every man of them started off through the door, as if he had been shot out of a pop-gun, to help find the child.
Certainly;—didn't I tell you that "farmers had hearts?" When a child gets lost in the city, the fat old town crier (if he is paid for it) "takes his time" and his bell, and crawls through the street, whining out sleepily, "C-h-i-l-d l-o-s-t;" and the city folks pay about as much attention to it, as if you told them that a six-days' kitten had presumptuously stepped into a wash-tub.
You didn't catch the nice, big-hearted farmers acting that way; they didn't say it was none of their business,—that their corn wanted hoeing, and their hay wanted stacking, and their meadows wanted ploughing! The sight of that poor weeping mother was enough. They started right off in companies, to scour the woods for the poor, little, lost boy, hoping to find him before night-fall.
There sat poor Desire, in the chimney corner, sobbing and wringing her hands, and rocking her body to and fro. She wouldn't eat, though good, kind, motherly Mrs. Moore, baked, on purpose for her, some of her most tempting cakes; she wouldn't drink, though Mrs. Moore handed her a nice hot cup of tea. She did nothing but cry fit to break her heart; while sensible little Mitty whispered to her mother to know "if she hadn't better go out of the way, for fear the sight of her, safe in her mother's log house, might make poor Desire cry the harder."