My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

Again I was called to suffer this trial, the chief trial of my boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only by the experience of survival from it, but by various circumstances. This time I went to D——, where one of my uncles was still living, and he somehow learned the misery I was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in D——. I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, who stood to me for all that was at once naturally and conventionally refined, a type of gracious loveliness and worldly splendor.

They had an only child, to whom her cousin’s presence in the house was a constant joy. Over them all hung the shadow of fragile health, and I look back at them through the halo of their early death; but the remembrance cannot make them kinder than they really were. With all that, I was homesick still. I fell asleep with the radiant image of our log-cabin before my eyes, and I woke with my heart like lead in my breast.

I did not see how I could get through the day, and I began it with miserable tears. I had found that by drinking a great deal of water at my meals I could keep down the sobs for the time being, and I practised this device to the surprise and alarm of my relatives, who were troubled at the spectacle of my unnatural thirst.

Sometimes I left the table and ran out for a burst of tears behind the house; every night after dark I cried there alone. But I could not wholly hide my suffering, and I suppose that after a while the sight of it became intolerable. At any rate, a blessed evening came when, returning from work, I found my brother waiting for me at my uncle’s house; and the next morning we set out for home in the keen, silent dark before the November dawn.

We were both mounted on the italic-footed mare, I behind my brother, with my arms round him to keep on better; and so we rode out of the sleeping town, and into the lifting shadow of the woods. They might have swarmed with ghosts or Indians; I should not have cared; I was going home.

By-and-by, as we rode on, the birds began to call one another from their dreams, the quails whistled from the stubble fields, and the crows clamored from the tops of the deadening;[A] the squirrels raced along the fence-rails, and, in the woods, they stopped half-way up the boles to bark at us; the jays strutted down the shelving branches to offer us a passing insult and defiance.

[A] The trees girdled, and left to die and decay, standing.

Presently, at a little clearing, we came to a log-cabin; the blue smoke curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the soft, low hum of a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew, dripped round us; and I was profoundly at peace. The homesick will understand how it was that I was as if saved from death.

At last we crossed a tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log-cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was “company.”

It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely-fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through all the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and admired the familiar outside of the house as freshly as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood-fires blazed upon the hearths, and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.