My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

of the wheel up there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution. But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid basement, the angry whirl of the burrs under the hoppers, the high windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a pleasure to the boy’s sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians, of course, made it their ambush.

With the saw-mill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not keep the grist-mill’s unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when the upright-saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet smell of the bruised woody fibres, or then when the circular-saw wailed through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood touched it again, and it broke again into its long lament.

The warm sawdust in the pits below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought up the logs or carried away the lumber. How we should have lived through all these complicated mechanical perils I cannot very well imagine now; but there is a special providence that watches over boys and appoints the greater number of them to grow up in spite of their environment.

Nothing was ever drowned in those swift and sullen races, except our spool-pig, as they call the invalid titman of the herd in that region; though once one of the grist-miller’s children came near giving a touch of tragedy to their waters. He fell into the race just above the saw-mill gate, and was eddying round into the rush upon its wheel, when I caught him by his long yellow hair, and pulled him out. His mother came rushing from her door at the outcry we had all set up, and perceiving him safe, immediately fell upon him in merited chastisement. No notice, then or thereafter, was taken of his preserver by either of his parents; but I was not the less a hero in my own eyes.

XII

I cannot remember now whether it was in the early spring after our first winter in the log-cabin, or in the early part of the second winter, which found us still there, that it was justly thought fit I should leave these vain delights and go to earn some money in a printing-office in X——. I was, though so young, a good compositor, swift and clean, and when the foreman of the printing-office appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the place of a delinquent hand, there was no question with any one but myself that I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly upon me—a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence, pierced my heart and filled my throat, and blinded me with tears.

The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day’s grace was granted me, and then my older brother took me to X——, where he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky, apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must always be associated for me with the despair that then filled my soul, and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked, and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. All the time I had every fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing, especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing, and how at every moment she was looking; I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about there.

The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gayety, when they came in, added to my desolation.

The man said supper was about ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father came; but in my own mind it was closed.

My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either of us; we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that boardinghouse, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a year’s absence.