Not often, now, did young Willard figure as chief in any mad scrape or wild boyish adventure. Those times were left behind. Once, indeed, his uncle Henry, the patron of the great chief "Kaw-shaw-gan-ce," swooped down upon the household, and, in an enormous four-horse sleigh of his own construction, took him, together with a gay and festive party of lads and lasses, off to Edwards, a village nine miles away. Here the rustic party had a "shake-down," and young Willard got fearfully sick in a dense atmosphere of tobacco smoke. The feast over, he was tightly packed in the sleigh with the buxom country girls and their muscular attendants, while Henry Glazier drove across country through a blinding snow-storm and over measureless drifts. The party was stranded at last on a rail fence under the snow, and the living freight flung bodily forth and buried in the deep drifts. They emerged from their snowy baptism with many a laugh and scream and shout, and tramped the remainder of the distance home. The horses having made good their escape, Willard was carried forward on his uncle Henry's back.
CHAPTER VIII.
ADVENTURES—EQUINE AND BOVINE.
Ward Glazier moves to the Davis Place. — "Far in the lane a lonely house he found." — Who was Davis? — Description of the place. — A wild spot for a home. — Willard at work. — Adventure with an ox-team. — The road, the bridge and the stream. — "As an ox thirsteth for the water." — Dashed from a precipice! — Willard as a horse-tamer. — "Chestnut Bess," the blooded mare. — The start for home. — "Bess" on the rampage. — A lightning dash. — The stooping arch. — Bruised and unconscious.
It will be remembered that when Ward Glazier left the Homestead, he removed to a neighboring farm known as the Goodrich Place,—a fine, comfortable, well-stocked and well-tilled farm, presenting an appearance of prosperity to the eye of the observer and calculated to make the impression that its owner must be well-to-do in the world. As we have heretofore hinted, however, Ward Glazier failed to prosper there. Why this was the case it is hard to tell. A late writer has suggested that "not only the higher intellectual gifts but even the finer moral emotions are an incumbrance to the fortune-hunter." That "a gentle disposition and extreme frankness and generosity have been the ruin in a worldly sense of many a noble spirit;" and he adds that "there is a degree of cautiousness and distrust and a certain insensibility and sternness that seem essential to a man who has to bustle through the world and engineer his own affairs,"—and if he be right, the matter may be easily understood.
However that may be, he failed to prosper, and as business misfortunes began to fall thick and fast upon his head, he gave up the farm to his creditors, together with all his other effects, and took up his abode at the Davis Place.
Who the particular Davis was whose name clung to the place we have been unable to ascertain, but when Ward Glazier moved there, the house seemed fairly to scowl upon the passer-by—so utterly unprepossessing was its appearance. A rude, capacious wooden structure, it stood fronting the highway, and was a place where the beautiful had no existence. The very soil looked black and rough—the vegetation rugged. Every inclosure was of stone or knotted timber, and even a dove-cot which in its fresher days some hand had placed upon the lawn, was now roofless and shattered, and lay prone upon the ground, a shapeless mass of collapsed boards. The lawn—if such it could be named—resembled a bleak shore, blackened with stranded wrecks of ships whose passengers had long years before gone down at sea. The broken windows in the dormitories were festooned with cobwebs that had housed long lines of ancestral spiders, and where a pane or two of glass remained among the many empty frames, one fancied a gibbering spectre might look out from the gloomy depths behind.
The back-ground against which this bleak and sombre place was thrown was no less grim and stern. Huge rocks in tiers, like stone coffins, rose in fierce ranges one above another up and up—back and farther back until they reached a point from whence a miniature forest of dwarf beech and maple, that appeared to crown the topmost bastion of them all, nodded in the swaying wind like funeral plumes upon a Titan's hearse.
In fact, the only gleam of light upon the place—and it was a crazy, fitful gleam at that—came from a rushing stream that took its source high up among the hills. This brook first seen off to the extreme left of the house, came dashing down the rocks until it reached a level. Then, swinging round with sudden swirl it engirdled the place, and after many a curious twist and turn got straight again and went onward far off among the neighboring fields and lost itself at last in the Oswegatchie. The interior of the house was just as wild and dreary as the exterior. The rooms, for the most part, were too large for comfort. When one spoke, a dozen ghostly echoes answered, and at twilight the smaller children huddled around the kitchen fire and seldom went beyond that cheerful room until bed time. Often, in the dead of night, the creaking of timber and the voices of the wind startled the little ones from sleep, and a sense of something unreal and mysterious overshadowed their young minds.
It was, take it all in all, a grim, gaunt, strange place in which to fix a home. It was there, however, in the midst of such sterile surroundings, that the next five years of Willard's life were mainly passed. There were no external influences brought to bear upon this portion of his existence that were not harsh and wild and stern. His father, honest even to the verge of fanaticism, was letting his heart corrode to bitterness under the sense of hopeless indebtedness. The churlish fields attached to the place offered but a grudging reward for the hardest labor. There was no hope of his acquiring a profession or even an education beyond the scant opportunity of Allen Wight's school, unless he himself could earn the means to pay for it. Still he was neither discouraged nor without hope. Instead of sinking under this accumulation of difficulties, his moral fibre was rendered more robust, and with it his physical strength and usefulness developed daily.