“We make no hay in this country. Our stock feeds out on the hills, or browses in the woods or cane-brakes, all winter. When we have to feed ’em, we throw out a little corn, fodder, and shucks.”
A loft over the mule-pen was filled with stalks and unhusked corn. Zeek went up into it, and threw down bundles of the former, and filled baskets of the latter, for his father to feed out to the multitude of waiting mouths.
I inquired particularly regarding the large quantities of natural manures which ought to accumulate in such a farm-yard.
“We just throw them out, and let them get trampled and washed away. We can’t haul out and spread. It’s the hardest work we ever did, and Tennesseans can’t get used to it.”
The yard was on a side hill, where every rain must wash it, and the mule-pen was conveniently situated near the brink of a gully, from which every freshet would sweep what was thrown into it. In vain I remonstrated against this system of farming: Mr. —— replied that he was brought up to it, and could not learn another.
CHAPTER XLIV.
A NIGHT IN A TENNESSEE FARM-HOUSE
We went into the house, and gathered around the sitting-room fire for a social evening’s talk. As it grew dark, the doors were closed, and we sat in the beautiful firelight. And now I learned a fact, and formed a theory, concerning doors.
The fact was this: not a door on the premises had either lock or bolt. Mule-pen, meat-house, and both divisions of the dwelling-house, were left every night without other fastening than the rude wooden latches of the country. This was a very common practice among the small farmers of that region. “It was a rare chance we ever used to hear of anything being stolen. My house was never robbed, and I never lost a mule or piece of meat till after war broke out.”
The closing of the doors at dark, not because the weather had grown colder, but apparently because there was no longer any daylight to admit, suggested to my mind the origin of the universal Southern custom of leaving doors open during the severest winter weather. The poor whites and negroes live very generally in huts and cabins without windows. Even the houses of the well-to-do small farmers are scantily supplied with these modern luxuries. The ancestors of the wealthier middle class dwelt not many years ago in similar habitations. Such is the strength of habit, and so strong the conservatism of imitative mankind, that I suppose a public statute would be necessary to compel now the shutting of doors of windowed houses against the piercing winds of the cold season; just as, according to Charles Lamb, the Chinese people’s method of obtaining roast pig by burning their dwellings over a tender suckling—that ravishing delicacy having been accidentally discovered to the world by the conflagration of a house with its adjoining pig-sty—had to be stopped by an imperial edict.
We sat without lamp or candle in the red gleaming firelight; and the faces of the little girls, who had been shrinking and shivering with the cold all day, took on a glow of comfort and pleasure, now that the house was shut. However, I could still feel gusts of the wintry air blowing upon me from openings between the logs. I have been in many Southern farm-houses; and I have heard the custom of open doors commended as necessary to give plenty of air and to toughen the inmates by wholesome exposure; but I do not now remember the habitation that was not more than sufficiently supplied with air, both for ventilating and toughening purposes, with every door closed.