ad been. She seemed to
have died and to have returned to us from the grave, and I am sure she
felt that she had done so. From that moment she took up again the burden
of her life, a burden she did not lay down until she passed away; but
her face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life
had cut upon it.

That night we slept on boughs spread on the earth inside the cabin
walls, and we put blankets before the holes which represented our doors
and windows, and kept our watch-fires burning. Soon the other children
fell asleep, but there was no sleep for me. I was only twelve years old,
but my mind was full of fancies. Behind our blankets, swaying in the
night wind, I thought I saw the heads and pushing shoulders of animals
and heard their padded footfalls.

We faced our situation with clear and unalarmed eyes the morning after
our arrival. The problem of food, we knew, was at least temporarily
solved. We had brought with us enough coffee, pork, and flour to last
for several weeks; and the one necessity father had put inside the cabin
walls was a great fireplace, made of mud and stones, in which our food
could be cooked. The problem of our water-supply was less simple, but my
brother James solved it for the time by showing us a creek a long
distance from the house, and for months we carried from this creek, in
pails, every drop of water we used, save that which we caught in troughs
when the rain fell.

We held a family council after breakfast, and in this, though I was only
twelve, I took an eager and determined part. I loved work--it has always
been my favorite form of recreation--and my spirit rose to the
opportunities of it which smiled on us from every side. Obviously the
first thing to do was to put doors and windows into the yawning holes
father had left for them, and to lay a board flooring over the earth
inside our cabin walls, and these duties we accomplished before we had
occupied our new home a fortnight. There was a small saw-mill nine miles
from our cabin, on the spot that is now Big Rapids, and there we bought
our lumber. The labor we supplied ourselves, and though we put our
hearts into it and the results at the time seemed beautiful to our
partial eyes, I am forced to admit, in looking back upon them, that they
halted this side of perfection. We began by making three windows and two
doors; then, inspired by these achievements, we ambitiously constructed
an attic and divided the ground