Few persons know that within one hundred and fifty miles of the Queen City of the West, bounded on both sides by highly cultivated tracts of country, looking out westwardly on the very garden of Kentucky, almost in the range of railroad and telegraph, in the very geographical centre of our most populous regions, there lie some thousand square miles of superb woodland, rolling, hill above hill, in the beautiful undulations which characterize the country bordering on the Ohio, watered by fair streams which need only the clearing away of the few obstructions incident to a new country to make them navigable, and yet a country where the mail passes only once a week, where all communication is by horse-paths or by the slow course of the flat-boat, where schools are not known and churches are never seen, where the Methodist itinerant preacher gives all the religious instruction, and a stray newspaper furnishes all the political information. Does any one doubt my statement? Then let him ask a passage up-stream in one of the flat-boats that supply the primitive necessities of the small farmers who dwell on the banks of the Big Sandy, in that debatable border-land which lies between Kentucky and Virginia; or let him, if he have a taste for adventure, hire his horse at Catlettsburg, at the mouth of the river, and lose his way among the blind bridle-paths that lead to Louisa and to Prestonburg. If he stops to ask a night's lodging at one of the farm-houses that are to be found at the junction of the creeks with the rivers, log-houses with their primitive out-buildings, their half-constructed rafts of lumber ready to float down-stream with the next rise, their 'dug-outs' for the necessities of river-intercourse, and their rough oxcarts for hauling to and from the mill, he will see before him such a home as that in which I passed the first twenty years of my life.
I had little claim on the farmer with whom I lived. I was the child by a former marriage of his wife, who had brought me with her into this wilderness, a puny, ailing creature of four years, and into the three years that followed was compressed all the happiness I could remember. The free life in the open air, the nourishing influence of the rich natural scenery by which I was surrounded, the grand, silent trees with their luxuriant foliage, the fresh, strong growth of the vegetation, all seemed to breathe health into my frame, and with health came the capacity for enjoyment. I was happy in the mere gift of existence, happy in the fulness of content, with no playmate but the kindly and lovely mother Earth from whose bosom I drew fulness of life.
But in my seventh year my mother died, worn out by the endless, unvarying round of labors which break down the constitutions of our small farmers' wives. She grew sallow and thin under repeated attacks of chills and fever, brought into the world, one after another, three puny infants, only to lay them away from her breast, side by side, under the sycamore that overshadowed our cornfield, and visibly wasted away, growing more and more feeble, until, one winter morning, we laid her, too, at rest by her babies. Before the year was out, my father (so I called him) was married again.
My step-mother was a good woman, and meant to do her duty by me. Nay, she was more than that: she was, as far as her poor light went, a Christian. She had experienced religion in the great revival of 18—, which was felt all through Western Kentucky, under the preaching of the Reverend Peleg Dawson, and when she married my father and went to bury herself in the wilds of "Up Sandy" was a shining light in the Methodist church, a class-leader who had had and had told experiences.
But all that glory was over now; it had flashed its little day: for there is a glow in the excitement of our religious revivals as potent in its effect on the imaginations of women and young men as ever were the fastings and penances which brought the dreams and reveries, the holy visions and the glorious revealings, of the Catholic votaries. In this short, triumphant time of spiritual pride lay the whole romance of my step-mother's life. Perhaps it was well for her soul that she was taken from the scene of her triumphs and brought again to the hard realities of life. The self-exaltation, the ungodly pride passed away; but there was left the earnest, prayerful desire to do her duty in her way and calling, and the first path of duty which opened to her zeal was that which led to the care of a motherless child, the saving of an immortal soul. And in all sincerity and uprightness did she strive to walk in it. But what woman of five-and-thirty, who has outlived her youth and womanly tenderness in the loneliness and hardening influences of a single life, and who marries at last for a shelter in old age, knows the wants of a little child? Indeed, what but a mother's love has the long-enduring patience to support the never ceasing calls for forbearance and perseverance which a child makes upon a grown person? Those little ones need the nourishment of love and praise, but such milk for babes can come only from a mother's breast. I got none of it. On the contrary, my dearly loved independence, my wild-wood life, where Nature had become to me my nursing-mother, was exchanged for one of never ceasing supervision. "Little girls must learn to be useful," was the phrase that greeted my unwilling ears fifty times a day, which pursued me through my daily round of dish-washings, floor-sweepings, bed-making and potato-peeling, to overtake me at last in the very moment when I hoped to reap the reward of my diligence in a free afternoon by the river-side in the crotch of the water-maple that hung over the stream, clutching me and fastening me down to the hated square of patchwork, which bore, in the spots of red that defaced its white purity in following the line of my stitches, the marks of the wounds that my awkward hands inflicted on themselves with their tiny weapon.
And so the years went on. It was a pity that no babies came to soften our hearts, my step-mother's and mine, and to draw us nearer together as only the presence of children can. A household without children is always hard and angular, even when surrounded by all the softening influences of refinement and education. What was ours with its poverty and roughness, its every-day cares and its endless discomforts? One day was like all the rest, and in their wearying succession they rise up in my memory like ghosts of the past coming to lay their cold, death-like hands on the feebly kindling hopes of the present. I see myself now, as I look back, a tall, awkward girl of fifteen, with my long, straggling, sunburnt hair, my sallow, yet pimply complexion, my small, weak-looking blue eyes, that every exposure to the sun and wind would redden, and my long, lean hands and arms, that offended my sense of beauty constantly, as I dwelt on their hopelessly angular turns. I had one beauty; so my little paper-framed glass, that rested on the rough rafter that edged the sloping roof of my garret, told me, whenever I took it down to gaze in it, which, but for that beauty, would have been but seldom. It was a finely cut and firmly set mouth and chin. There was, and I felt it, beauty and character in the curves of the lips, in the rounding of the chin; there was even a healthy ruddiness in the lips, and something of delicacy in the even, well-set teeth that showed themselves when they parted.
The gazing at these beauties gave me great pleasure, not for any effect they might ever produce in others,—what did I know of that?—but because I had in myself a strong love of the beautiful, a passion for grace of form and brilliancy of color which made doubly distasteful to me our bare, uncouth walls, with their ugly, straight-backed chairs, and their frightfully painted yellow or red tables and chests-of-drawers.
My step-mother's appearance, too, was a constant offence to my beauty-loving eye,—with her lank, tall figure, round which clung those narrow skirts of "bit" calico, dingy red or dreary brown,—her feet shod in the heavy store-shoes which were brought us from Catlettsburg by the returning flat-boat men,—her sharp-featured face, the forehead and cheeks covered with brown, mouldy-looking spots, the eyes deep-set, with a livid, dyspeptic ring around them, and the lips thin and pinched,—the whole face shaded by the eternal sun-bonnet, which never left her head from early sunrise till late bedtime (no Sandy woman is ever seen without her sun-bonnet). All these were perpetual annoyances to me; they made me discontented without knowing why; they filled me with disgust, a disgust which my respect for her good qualities could not overcome.
And then our life, how dreary! The rising in the cold, gray dawn to prepare the breakfast of corn-dodgers and bacon for my father and his men,—the spreading the table-cloth, stained with the soil-spots of yesterday's meal,—the putting upon it the ugly, unmatched crockery,—the straggling-in of the unwashed, uncombed men in their coarse working-clothes, redolent of the week's unwholesome toil,—their washings, combings, and low talk close by my side,—the varied uses to which our household utensils were put,—the dipping of dirty knives into the salt and of dirty fingers into the meat-dish,—all filled me then, and fill me now, with loathing.