"Oh! them's beavers' skulls. My! I wish we had some beavers here now; I would make you some beaver-tail soup."
"Why, did you have them here since you came?"
"Oh, yes! plenty of them. When I got lonesome—and that was pretty much every day—I used to go and watch them build their dams. I don't know how they did it; but I have seen them sink a log so that it would stay put, and not come up. I tried it dozens of times, but could not do it. I had lots of time, nothing to read, and the nearest town fifteen miles away. I used to think I should go mad sometimes, and even a land-hunter coming from outside was a godsend. Indeed, I remember one coming here, and he took sick, and died in spite of all we could do. We had neither boards nor planks, nothing but logs. So we slipped two flour-barrels over him, and he looked real nice. We buried a little boy too. I keep the graves clear of weeds, and plant flowers about them, and often sit there with my work and think of those early days."
"How long ago was that?" I asked.
"Four years ago! Why, you know there wan't no railway then; but now,—why, I got Zeke to cut down the trees, and I can see the trains go by with parlor cars and sleepers. There'll be one pretty soon if it is on time." And sure enough, in a few minutes a long train thundered by.
Sometimes a train stopped near us, and hundreds of men from the south of Ohio came with their dogs, guns, and men-servants, and went hunting and fishing; and, strange as it may seem, you can find ten times as many deer to-day as you could forty years ago. The settling of new lands has driven them into closer quarters, and the game-law does much good. The State fish-hatcheries supply the streams with fry; and at times the men sent out to stock the streams get misled by the settlers, who show them the different streams, and only too late they find they have put the whole stock of young fry into the same stream. The average conscience is not yet fine enough to see anything but a joke in this.
But to the building of our village. Often at first no house has more than one room. The men are making their homes, and will stop to cut out a piece of the log, and make a place for a little child's doll. Cupboards, too, are made in the same way.
Water is one of the indispensable necessities; and, as a rule, the town will be built on a stream, or near a spring. Sometimes wells have to be dug over a hundred feet deep. Arrow-heads, and implements of the chase, and bones of men and extinct races of animals, turn up.
In one town I visited, before the wells were dug, the water for drinking was brought in barrels on flat cars, while melted snow answered for washing.
"But what did you do when that was gone?" I asked.