Derwent; or, Recollections of young life in the country

Front matter

^^1^^5 t LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. I

J UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. |

RECOLLECTIONS

Contents

Paoe.

OuE Home, 19

Fetchikg Fire, 25

I. Derwent

DERWENT.

DERWENT was one of the four parishes in the broad old township of Fenwick. It is a town now ; but I love best to remember it as a parish. That term best suits its old-time history.

It was a rural, cheerful district everywhere, with much of the picturesque in places, — dells, rocks, brooks, woods, sightly hill-tops, and pleasant meadows.

The Derwent waters were pleasing features of the place. There was the broad Connecticut in front. That shall have a separate notice bye and bye. There were the Derwent and the Little Derwent, tributaries to the Connecticut. It is remarkable that streams will never run straight, if the)'' can help it. Among hills they must run crooked, taking such courses as the valleys open to them ; but they will cut for themselves serpentine channels through the softest flat mealO D E R WEN T.

dows, and often, shifting ones, as though sonne freak, or whim, possessed them. That was the way of the Derwent ; a vessel following its windings, through bush and meadow, would be long under your eye, if you watched it, — ^its sails now filled, and now flapping, as the humors of the stream made the wind fair or foul for it.

The Little Derwent was a pretty stream, reachmg inland a mile or more, ebbing and flooding with the river tides to that extent, beyond which it became a brook. Wild ducks and other water fowl delighted in its broad marshes. Cranberries grew in these spontaneously, not in any quantity for the market, but enough of them to pay you for a wet foot, if a handful or two would satisfy you. The sachem-pea also grew there, whose large, velvety leaf you could not wet, the water rolling off" from it as it does from a waterfow.s breast.

Pigeon Pond, in the northern part of the parish, was a deep, round, brimming basin, of the purest, coldest water. There was good reason for its pureness and coldness ; it was fed by springs only, from underneath it, — satisfied from itself, as Solomon says a good man is. Though there was no stream running into it, there was a copious

DERIVENT. II

one, large enough for a considerable water-power, flowing out of it. Wurts's grist-mill, which was one of the " seven wonders " of my childhood, was worked by this stream. What was singular about this lakelet was, that being on high ground, with no hills, or higher grounds, sending streams into it, it got nothing from the rains except the drops that fell on its bosom ; and yet it was always full and out-flowing. Its circumference might be half a mile.

This little water was attractive to me, as all waters are to boys ; and I loved it for reasons such as a young mind oftener feels than analyzes, its beauty, its solitude, its stillness, and the images it mirrored, — clouds, birds, overhanging treej. And perhaps, also, I had some kindly regard for the only craft that floated on it, — a weather-blackened, oarless old canoe, looking as lone as the Ark does in a picture.

You would find fishes there, too, if you were fond of angling ; and they were of the best kjnds for the frying-pan, — perch, roach, pickerel, with none Of the refuse sorts, such as dace and bullheads. The pond appeared to be full of them. My cousin Isaac VValdron and I, half-grown boys .hen, coming home that way from our ramblings

12 ■ D E R [VENT.

in the woods behind it, after game, sat down there to rest and talk, and having our hooks with us, soon caught as many as we cared to carry, with our birds and squirrels. How came the fish to be there ? Curious people often asked and wondered how. No one knew. The Indians could not have put them there, they thought, their means and habits being what they were. There was, however, no great mystery in the case ; some curious or thoughtful early settler, brought their progenitors from the river in a bucket, and colonized them, a little piscatory settlement, in the midst .of woods and Indians ; and from that it had grown to this.

The other lake, called Beaver Lake, was in the western half of the parish. We called that the Lakeside, and the people living there Lakesiders. This was a larger water than Pigeon Pond, being a mile and a half, or more perhaps, in circumference. There were a few dwellings along its western marg-in, looking complacently out on it, and less complacently, I should think, across it, on a sloping wooded ridge that limited their view, and had no compensating beauty. An old chronicler says of this " Pond," as he too diminutively calls it, that it is " remarkable for its being formed by a dam, sufficiently wide for a cart-path, which was apparently made by beavers." Famous builders, truly, are the beavers. There was another of their structures, on a large brook not far from us, which was named the Beaver Mill-Dam, some man having once set up a small saw-mill on it. The man and mill passed away, and were forgotten, while the beavers' work and name became permanently connected with the locality. I feel some satisfaction in making this record of the curious and useful labors both of these and those others which made the dam at the foot of the lake. An opportune service, this was, for the first settlers there ; for the beaver-built causeway which they Found ready for them, just separated the lake from a swamp of such a character that they would have found it difficult, with their means, to make a road through it. That swamp, of large extent, was filled with cedars, which were so thick, and tall, and dark, that it was said you could not venture far into it without a compass, or a guide, in a cloudy day, but at the risk of not finding your way out of it ; and certainly it had a labyrinthian look.

I never passed it without admiring its countless,, lofty, pointed evergreen tops. It is probable

DER WENT.

that it was once overflowed by the lake, which still discharges itself into it. The lake was the great bathing-place of the young men and boys of that vicinity. In it grew the longest-stemmed pond lilies that I have ever seen, — a fact which a boy would be likely to remember.

Our old highways had some charms that were peculiar to them. They were rude and rambling, with rarely a level mile, and still less frequently a straight one in them, — running amicably along brook-sides, following their humors, often crossing them on rude timber bridges; asserting their right of way through narrow passes between rocks and hillocks; chmbing and descending hills; damaged by the ever-washing rain, and rvidely repaired. And so unstinted in their width ! One might think that the object of the old proprietors had been to throw as much land into the highways as they could, instead of stealing as much from them as they dared, as some people now do.

Those old, primitive highways ! — there wil never be any more such. They are antiques, pictures, histories. I see in them the enterprise, the labors, the courage, and the large-heartedness of men making homes for themselves and their posterity in wilds which were pathless and sunless till they came.

In one of them was a mile of road which is to me the most interesting that my memory recalls. It is that which took me to and from the house of God, and to and from the school, with loving sisters and a kind brother for companions. It is alive, too, in my retrospect, with the images, and merry with the voices, of school-mates and play-fellows ; — how many of whom fulfilled their short and uneventful day long since, and are gone.

The reader of a book hkes to know something of the place to which it takes him, and this partial sketch of Derwent has been given with reference to such a wish. There are several other localities, — Hemlock Ledge, The Crows' Rest, The Narrows — to which 1 would invite a friend to go with me, if we were in the place ; but topographies, often wearisome, are never satisfactory.

The Derwent people were farmers, most of them. They lived scattered along the roads, with here and there a closer small neighborhood.

X6 DERWENT.

The largest of these was at Derwent Head, which was, as the name implies, the head of tide-watei on the Derwent, and was our business centre. There were brought and dropped, in grand confusion, great piles of timber, cord-wood, plank, and whatever the woods furnished for ship-yards and the market. Our only factory was the " Anchor Works," a great dingy building, or system of buildings, in the bottom of a valley through which flowed the stream that supplied its water-power. It was something of an adventure, for a young boy, to go down into it, in the evening, to see its glowing forges, and wonder that the anvil's great showers of sparks did not burn the workmen ; and it was a delight to listen to its trip-hammer, at a mile's distance, on a still morning. The ship-yards afforded us a fine sensation, now and then, in the sight of a launch.

1 1.

OUR HOME.

OUR HOME was on a small elevated plat, facing the river, and somewhat less than a mile from it. We thought the house none the less respectable for being old and having sheltered three generations prior to ours. It was open, on its hill-top site, to all wholesome airs, and its windows glistened in the morning sunbeams while the valleys were yet sleeping in the twilight. If you wish to wake to early and pleasant thoughts, an elevated sleeping- room, with an eastern exposure, is to your purpose. Give late sleepers the shady side, with candles to make up after bed-time for the better hours the)?^ lose in the morning.

The well, more than forty feet in depth, was such as hill and rock necessitated. I suspect that my earliest emotions of the subhme were experienced at that well. So dark and deep ! t dropped pebbles into it — chick ! — to see the water sparkle and note how long the sound was in coming up to me, — as a child will. Its apparatus for drawing was the crotch, sweep, and pole, the oldest and simplest sort of well-gear in New England, as I think it is in all the first-settled parts of our coinitry. And perhaps it is the best, if you have space and sky-room for it. It keeps the well open to the light and air, which is favorable, if not essential, to its pureness, while the often-dipped bucket stirs the water and keeps it from stagnating. It has a picturesque, as well as a historic interest.

It is peculiarly suggestive. To the traveller on a rui'al highway, a well-sweep near a house speaks of home and the domestic life more em phatically than does any other object.

Did you ever think of the crotch, sweep, and pole as an original contrivance ? When and where was it first used ? Tliere is no mention of any fixture at all similar to it in the accounts we have of ancient wells. The common mode appears to have been to draw with a cord and a water-pot, or pitcher, of pottery or metal, that would dip itself A marble curb, found among the ruins of one of Tiberius's villas, and preserved m the British Museum, shows marks, around its edges, of the cords with which they drew. " Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep," said the woman of Samaria to Jesus at Jacob's well. She herself, undoubtedly, had come provided with a rope, together with her water-pot. Solomon speaks of the wheel broken at the cistern, from which we should suppose that wheels, or windlasses, were more or less in use at wells.

T have not seen the apparatus we are speaking of in foreign countries, and I once thought it might be an invention of the early settlers of America: but it is in fact much older, and has been used more extensively, than I supposed. In a wood-cut of the date of 1518, belonging to an elaborate series entitled " Triumphs of Maximilian," by Hans Burgmair, a contemporary of Albert Durer and his rival in the art of design, there is represented a rich embroidered saddlecloth on which is shown a woman drawing water by her cottage, from a well with a pole, sweep, and bucket, and a rude curb of l<9gs.

The contrivance, by whomsoever it may have been devised, is a thing curious in conception, a? well as useful in its working. In drawing water with a pole, the trouble was to keep it straight up and steady in the air, which it was difficult tc do if the well was at all deep, or if there was wind ; and its weight, too, in addition to that of the bucket, had to be lifted at arm's length. You wanted a man aloft to help you. But see how these inconveniencies arc disposed of by the sweep. It takes charge of the pole, lowers and raises it perpendicularly, and helps you lift just as much as you please to have it, by the weights you put upon its lower end.

And this further may be said for it, that any man can set up the crotch, sweep, and pole for himself, while in many cases, particularly in remote or new settlements, other kinds of gear cannot be had.

III. Fetching Fire

HALF-WAY between us and the river, on a lower plat than ours, lived our nearest neighbors, Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Prudden ; their houses and farms being on opposite sides of the road which ran down past us to the landing. The Pruddens were agreeable neighbors and good people ; the Crabbes were such as we shall see. They were an aged couple, living quite alone. Among my very early recollections is that of an incident connected with my first visit to their house. It may seem trivial; but, as young life, regarded as a whole, includes the life of the child as well as that of youth, we must allow a place to some such memories as this, in a few of the pages that are to follow.

It is a great thing to be a child. For that is to be, more than is possible at any maturer age, a sight-seer and adventurer. In a world as new to him as he is 3'oung in it, the little learner finds himself surrounded by curiosities and wonders. Every sound, color, shape, and motion, arrests him. This is the secret of his dreams and musings, and his many questions ; and this, too, accounts for the distinctness of his subsequent recollections.

I had run down to the old man's, Mr. Crabbe's, with one of 'the maids, on a bright, frosty morning, to get some fire. Very strange, now, would seem the idea of lending or borrowing fire ; but as there were no friction matches in those days, the practice was to keep it on the hearth if possible ; and if it chanced to go out,, it might be necessary to resort to a neighbor's supply. You imbedded in the ashes, over night, some of the brands or coals, or, if the family had sat up until these were too nearly consumed, you were prepared with a bit of seasoned hickory, or other hard wood, to rake up with remains enough of fire to ignite it. This was a very considerable item of house-keeping care. It required some tact to make sure of success ; for, if you buried your brand too deeply, it would be smothered and extinguished ; or, if too slightly, it would all burn out and be gone.

It was, in fact, an experiment, and a somewhat critical one, to be repeated nightly. If it failed, as it often would, so that, in the morning, you poked and raked in vain among the ashes for your hid treasure of coals, or for so much as a spark which your breath might kindle into more, or which you could light a match with, then you had to strike fire. You went to some shelf, or cuddy, and took thence a piece of steel shaped so as to be held conveniently, a box or horn of tinder, a gun-flint, and a brimstone match ; and you were, of course, provided with a candle. The spark struck from the steel ignited the tinder, the tinder lit the match, the match lit the candle, the candle set ablaze the wood, and so, behold how great a matter a little fire — a red particle of steel — kindled !

If you happened to be out of tinder, or of matches, you must go, then, to a neighbor's for fire ; and a later breakfast and keener appetites would be the consequence. So, too, if you w^anted a light in the night, you must strike one, or find fire on the hearth ; or, these means failing, you must go and wake some neighbor for it, — if light or fire you must have ; which would sometimes happen, as in a case of sudden illness.

Vessels at sea, whose tinder became damp, or was spent, would be without light in the binnacle, or fire in the caboose, for the remainder of the passage, unless some spoken ship supplied them. Crews suffered, and sometimes vessels were lost, in these circumstances.

Such were the ways in which our morning fires were set agoing, and our extinct fires renewed ; and I have that regard for the steely and flint, and tinder-box, that I deem them worthy to be preserved as memorials of the olden time. Of what date they are, as an invention, it is beyond history to say ; but in old people's memories they are of the days of great fire-places, huge " back-logs," glowing hearths, dipped candles, and rare incendiarisms.

We went, as I was saying, Betty and I, after fire. The old man was just uncovering a plentiful store of coals and brands. I remember how he looked. Gross and heavy, he seemed a Bluebeard in his castle ; for his house was a strongtimbered, unfinished, ill-lighted building, and was hung with cobwebs. His uncombed coarse gray hair stood all ways ; his beard was equally neglected ; he had shaggy brows, ashy eyes, and a

D ER WENT.

huge fungus-like nose ; and from the condition of his garments you might have thought he had slept in them on a heap of swingHng-tow. These were a child's impressions of him, and as I saw him then I see him now. The wife was as untidy as the husband.

"Fire?" said the old man, with a crustiness that made me step backward ; " why don't folks keep fire, and not be runnin' to their neighbors after it ? Where 's your tongs ? "

Betty, not at all disconcerted by his manner, said she had not brought any tongs ; a couple of chips would do to carry a coal between, if he had n't a brand for her.

" And so you want a part of my wood-pile, to make you out, — a couple of my big chips, heh ? Go out and get 'em then ; but 1 wish folks would fetch their own chips, or th'else their tongs, if they must be comin' arter fire."

" Just a couple of small chips, as big as clamhells, or two bits of bark, will do," said Betty. " But there's a nice little brand, there, can't you spare me that, Mr. Crabbe ? "

" Here, take it, then;" and he held out to her, in his tongs, not the brand she meant, but another so hot that she could not touch it, and he knew

DER WENT.

she could not. " Quick ; you're fiUin' the house — pff-ff — chuck full of smoke ! "

" Thank you, Mr. Crabbe ; that '11 do nicely," said Betty, with the very perfection of good-nature in her tone. " But please let me take tongs and all just to get out doors with it, and I can manage it then, I guess." And running out with it, she dropped it on the ground, and returned the tongs. Then, getting a piece of turf which a cart-wheel had cut up in the yard, she wrapped it around one end of the burning stick, and so we went smoking homewards.

IV. Going To Mill

FIRST THINGS are memorabilia with us; — the first sled, or whistle, for example ; the first suit of boy's clothes, (with pockets in them !) ; the first day at school; the first sight of the ocean ; of a ship ; of a lighthouse ; of a burning building. Through repetition, and our growth in years, such things cease to interest us as they did, yet we always continue to remember them as first possessions «r experiences.

Among my own First Things was a visit to the mill. Smith Scofield was going with a grist, and as he was starting from the door, the humor took my father to put me up behind him. " There, John," said he ; "you may go, too, and learn the way."

Smith Scofield was one of our farm-hands. He was a tallish young man, had a kindly tenor voice, wore light summer working-clothes, and a slouched hat. This is all I remember of him. 3 (33)

" As plain as the way to mill," people say. The way to Wurts's mill was not plain ; it was hid away in the fields. At the end of a mile and a half by the highway, you turned right out into a wild of bush pastures and remnants of old woods. This was a new region to me, Urra nova, and my eyes and ears, in passing through it, were those of an explorer.

There were numerous gates and bars to pass through here, at each of which Smith would let me down by the arm upon the ground, dismount himself, lower and put up the bars, or open and shut the gate, as the case might be, remount and pull me up again into my place ; so that it was no small affair for two such travellers to get forward on such a road, with • grist-laden horse. The path was rude and crooked ; it had been made only by wheels and hoofs ; but its rudeness gave it interest.

We had proceeded half a mile, perhaps, through these fields, following the humor of the path, without seeing the mill, when, at length, a low rumbling, and a " clack, clack," mingled with a dashing sound of water, told us we were near it ; and then, passing round a patch of woods that had screened it, " There 's the mill," said Smith.

D ER WENT.

And there it was ! I was silent, now, till we came- to it. It stood at the foot of a narrow ravine, the natural outlet of a romantic little lake not far behind it, which supplied its working power. Regarded as a building merely, it was, to be sure, but a weather-beaten bro"wn thing ; but attached to it, outside, there was a great wheel, revolving very swiftly under a stream of water that came pouring down upon it from a trough above. Such a wheel ! — its height, its huge shaft, its wide rim, its many buckets ! — I marvelled how they ever got it up, and upright, from the ground, and into its place.

We went in. Smith was careful to have me understand all that was going on there. He showed me the whirling stone that did the grinding betwixt it and a fixed one under it; made me notice how it fed itself with grain just so fast as it wanted it, and no faster, by hitting the hopper and jarring it with its clack, which was a peg fixed in the stone, every time it came round called my attention to the long revolving sieve, the bolter, which sifted the flour from the bran ; and to the cog-wheels, fitting into each other; and all kept moving and at work by that giant wheel outside. All this, with the rumbhng, and the clacking, and the many bags with grists waiting to be ground, or to be come for, with their owners' names on them, and the flour bedusted floor, and the dusty cobwebs, 'and the dusty miller, made the inside a curious place, and interested me a good deal ; but I was soon out again, gazing at the great thing of all, the waterwheel. It made me dizzy to look up at it. I easily imagined it a thing of life ; it seemed as if it were shrinking and dodging down from under the rude pouring it all the while got upon it, while the saucy, tireless water made a frolic of its work, letting itself down by the wheel's buckets, (which I tried to count, and could not,) and laughing and bounding away along its stony path.

I have seen, since that day, some of the most famous structures which human hands have built, but I can hardly say I have ever seen any that quite equalled that tremendous, dizzy, toiling overshot wheel. You may smile at this ; but remember it is a child's wonder at which you smile, . and that things are great, not by measurement in the carpenter's way, by line and rule, but by their effect on the beholder. This is the child's standard for estimating sublimities and grand-

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eurs ; and we shall find, if we reflect, that we take the same on with us to life's end. Whether you are three years old, or three-score, nothing is great, for you, that does not impress you greatly, and nothing is small that does.

And herein, if they will read it, is a lesson for those sedate grown people who wonder at and repress the extravagant emotions of children.

V. A Starlight Ride

THEY woke me out of the sound sleep of a play-wearied boy, a little after the clock in the " long room " had struck ten, one evening, and told me that my grandmother Woodhouse, who had been spending the day with us, and had staid later than usual, was going to take me home with her. She mounted from the horse-block, and they put me up behind her with an abundance of good-byes and cautions. " Take care, and don't fall off, John, — don't get asleep, John." Good advice, but perhaps easier to give than to follow, with the rocking of a drowsy horse to hinder, and only a crupper to hold on by.

VVe had two long miles to go, — long to me by daylight, longer beneath the stars. I had been over the same road often, but never at such an hour ; and it was so grand to be travelling in the night !

Night has as many things to see as the day, and more for the imagination to be busy with. Night fashions its own world : it has its own creatures, its own colors, shapes and voices, its own grandeurs, its own mysteries. How many things I saw, heard, felt, and fancied, in that ride, which would have been absent in the day-time ! The tops of hills faintly lighted from the sky, their sides mantled with their own deep shadows ; stars riding on their ridges, or going down behind them, — these were of the scenery of the night. How black the shade was, under the trees and rocks ! A grove in a valley looked as if it stood in a pond of ink.

The hour was late, as I have said, when we started ; the lights were out in most of the nearest houses as we passed them, and by the time we reached the little village around the Green, which was about mid-way of our distance, there was not a candle left.

All the houses dark. How still the world was then ! — as still, it seemed to me, as the sky above us. It was not a stillness without a sound : it was that deep quiet which renders audible the faintest sounds, — the cricket's chirp, the falling leaf, — and makes loud sounds louder. I could hear the cows by the road-side, chewing their cuds, with their long breaths between. And how loud the brooks were ! We had several of them to cross, two large ' ones, with wooden bridges, and two or three smaller ones. Each of these had its own proper melodies. Every brook has as many varieties of sound as there are changes in its bed. In one place it murmurs along a stony channel ; in another, tumbling over a ledge, it gives you the gushings of the waterfall ; in another, winding through a meadow, it seems to be singing itself asleep. The listening ear hears these different voices of the stream separately and distinctly, as it does the several parts of a concert, or a choir, and at the same time is sensible of the combined effects of them all.