the days
of my boyhood, the light of it still illumined her, and she never
questioned that He who had led them into the wilderness would maintain
them in it. She seemed to have but one care in her life while I knew
her--to know and do her duty. She found a special providence in
every instance of relief from their pressing wants, and I recall the
religious serenity with which she told me of the greatest strait of
the hardest winter of that period, when resources seemed to have been
exhausted to the last crumb, and they unexpectedly received from one
of her half brothers, who had gone farther west, and lived in what was
practically the wilderness, a barrel of salted pigeons' breasts.
There had been one of those almost fabulous flights of the now nearly
extinct passenger pigeons, which used to come north to breed in such
numbers that the forests where they colonized were so filled with
their nests that the settlers went into them and beat the young down
with poles, and the branches became so overloaded with the broods in
their nests that their weight often broke them down and threw the
young on the ground. They had that year chosen the forests in my
uncle's neighborhood for their nesting ground, and had been killed by
thousands and salted down for winter provision, only the breast being
used, owing to the superabundance of the birds. The gift came like the
answer to a prayer, for there was hunger in the house and the snow was
heavy on the ground, all the community being more or less in the same
straits.

Being the youngest of nine children, I can remember my mother only in
the days of comparative freedom from anxiety, when, the day's work
over and the house quiet, she used, as she sat by the fire with her
knitting, which occupied all the moments when her hands were not
required for other duties,--she knit all the stockings required for
the family,--to tell me incidents of her past life, mostly to show how
kind God had been to her and hers, and how faith in his providence
was justified in the event. Of herself she spoke only incidentally.
Dominating every act and thought of her existence was the profoundest
religious veneration I have ever met with, an openness of her mind
upward, as if she felt that the eternal eye was on her and reading her
thoughts. The sense of her responsibility was so serious that I think
that only the absorbing activity of her daily life, and the way in
which every moment was occupied with positive