My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

Chapter X

Our new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding.

In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded[Pg 41] and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and our home was fashioned according to his plans.

It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town—from the pitiful little village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.

I try to give merely a child’s impressions of our life, which were nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for my mother especially, who could get no help, or only[Pg 42] briefly and fitfully, in the work that fell to her. What her pleasures were I can scarcely imagine. She was cut off from church-going because we were Swedenborgians; short of Cincinnati, sixty miles away, there was no worship of our faith, and the local preaching was not edifying, theologically or intellectually.

Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of mental and spiritual refreshment. Otherwise, my father read us a service out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to us—Scott or Moore or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.

In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river. One such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flat boat, which we[Pg 43] kept oil the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck the swift current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again.

It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam, where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves and the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe; and life was rich unspeakably.

I recollect the complex effect of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights when my brother used to row across the river to the cabin of the B——s, where the poor man and his children lay dying in turn, and I wondered and shuddered at his courage; but there is one night that remains single and peerless in my memory.[Pg 44]

My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s—for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter—and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well into the night when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stand in a park-like freedom from underbrush, and the grass grows dense and rich among them.

We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the closely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed[Pg 45] not only to liberate me from the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy. Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that whatever perishes there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.