He was a faithful, hard-working man, a carpenter by trade. He built our "new barn" in 1844 and put a new roof on the old barn. Father got out the timber for the new barn in old Jonas More's hemlocks and hauled it to the sawmill. Lanson Davids worked with him. They had their dinner in the winter woods. One day they had a pork stew and Father said he had never eaten anything in his life that tasted so good. He and Mother were then in the flower of their days and Lanson Davids said to him on this occasion: "Chauncey, you are the biggest hog to eat I ever saw in my life." "I was hungry," said Father.
We had "raisings" in those days, when a new building was put up. The timbers were heavy, often hewn from trees in the woods, set up, pinned together in what were called "bents." In a farmer's barn there were usually four bents, tied together by the "plates" and cross beams. I remember well the early summer day when the new barn was raised. I can see Elihu guiding the corner post of the first bent and when the men were ready calling out: "All together now," "set her up," "heave 'o heave, heave 'o heave," till the bent was in position.
One June when he was shingling the old barn he engaged me to pick him some wild strawberries. When I came in the afternoon with my four-quart pail nearly full he came down off the roof and gave me a silver quarter, or two shillings, as then called, and I felt very rich.
It is an open country, like an unrolled map, simple in all its lines, with little variety in its scenery, devoid of sharp contrasts and sudden changes and hence lacking in the element of the picturesque which comes from these things. It is a part of the earth's surface that has never been subject to convulsion and upheaval. The stratified rock lies horizontally just as it was laid down in the bottom of the Devonian Seas millions of years ago. The mountains and the valleys are the result of vast ages of gentle erosion, and gentleness and repose are stamped upon every feature of the landscape. The hand of time and the slow but enormous pressure of the great continental ice sheet have rubbed down and smoothed off all sharp angles, giving to the mountains their long sweeping lines, to the hills their broad round backs, and to the valleys their deep, smooth, trough-like contours. The level strata crop out here and there, giving to the hills the effect of heavy eyebrows. But occasionally it is more than that: in the mountains it is often like a cavernous mouth into which one can retreat several yards, where the imaginative farm boy loves to prowl and linger like the half savage that he is and dream of Indians and the wild, adventurous life. There were a few such cavernous ledges in the woods on my father's farm where one could retreat from a sudden shower, but less than a mile away there were two lines of them, one on Pine Hill and one on Chase's Hill, where the foundations of the earth were laid open, presenting a broken and jagged rocky front from ten to thirty or forty feet high, gnawed full of little niches and pockets and cavernous recesses by the never-dulled tooth of geologic time and affording dens and retreats where Indians and wild beasts often took refuge. As a boy how I used to haunt these places, especially on Sunday when young winter-green and black birch gave us an excuse to go to the woods. What an eternity of time was written in the faces of those rocks! What world-old forces had left their marks there!—in the lines, in the colours, in the huge dislocations and look of impending downfall of many of them, yet with a look of calm and unconquerable age that can be felt only in the presence of such survivals of the primaeval. I want no better pastime now, far from my boyhood as I am, than to spend part of a summer or autumn day amid these rocks. One passes from the sunny fields, where the cattle are grazing or the plough is turning the red furrow, into these gray, time-sculptured, monumental ruins, where the foundations of the everlasting hills are crumbling, and yet where the silence and the repose are like that of sidereal space. How relative everything is! The hills and the mountains grow old and pass away in geologic time as invariably as the snow bank in spring, and yet in our little span of life they are the types of the permanent and unchanging.
The phoebe bird loves to build its mossy nest in these shelving ledges, and once I found that one of our native mice, maybe the jumping mouse, had apparently taken a hint from her and built a nest of thistledown covered with moss on a little shelf three or four feet above the ground. Coons and woodchucks often have their dens in these ledges, and before the country was settled no doubt bears did also. In one place, under a huge ledge that projects twelve or fifteen feet, there is a spring to which cattle come from the near fields to drink. The old earth builders used material of very unequal hardness and durability when they built these hills, their contracts were not well supervised, and the result has been that the more rapid decay of the softer material has undermined the harder layers and led to their downfall. Every fifty or a hundred or two hundred feet in the Catskill formation the old contractors slipped in a layer of soft, slatey, red sandstone which introduces an element of weakness and that we everywhere see the effects of. One effect of this weakness has an element of beauty. I refer to the beautiful waterfalls that are sparsely scattered over this region, made possible, as nearly everywhere else, by the harder strata holding out after the softer ones beneath have eroded away, thus keeping the face of the falls nearly vertical.
The Catskill region is abundantly supplied with springs that yield the best water in the world. My father's farm had a spring in nearly every field, each one with a character of its own. What associations linger about each one of them! How eagerly we found our way to them in the hot haying and harvesting days!—the small, cold, never-changing spring in the barn-hill meadow under the beech tree, upon whose now decayed bowl half-obliterated initials of farm boys and hired men of thirty, fifty, and nearly seventy years ago may still be seen; the spring in the old meadow near the barn where the cattle used to drink in winter and where, with the haymakers, I used to drink so eagerly in summer; the copious spring in the bank at the foot of the old orchard which, in the severe drouths of recent years, holds out when other springs fail; the tiny but perennial spring issuing from under the huge tilted rock in the sumac field where the young cattle and the sheep of the mountain pasture drink and where we have all refreshed ourselves so many times; the spring from under a rocky eyebrow on the big side hill which is now piped to the house and which in my boyhood was brought in pine or hemlock "pump logs," and to which I have been sent so many times to clean the leaves off the tin strainer—what associations have we all of us with that spring! For over eighty years it has supplied the family with water, and not till the severe drouths of later years did it fail.
The old beech tree that stands above it is one of the landmarks of the farm. Once when a boy I saw a flock of wild pigeons disappear in its leafy interior, and then saw Abe Meeker, who worked for Father in 1840, shoot into it from the stone wall, six or seven rods below, and bring down four birds which he could not see when he fired. Three of them fell dead and one fell at his feet behind the stone wall. But I need not call the roll of all the fountains of my youth on the home farm—fountains of youth indeed! and fountain of grateful memories in my later years. I never pass any of them now but my footsteps linger by them and I clean them out if they are clogged and neglected and feel that here is a friend of other days whose face is as bright and youthful as ever.