kins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out
with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare, and if the
earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the grass which was its
first carpet. The cabin had but one room where the whole of life went
on by day; the father and mother slept there at night, and the children
mounted to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder.

The food was what has been already named. The meat was venison, bear,
raccoon, wild turkey, wild duck, and pheasant; the drink was water, or
rye coffee, or whisky which the little stills everywhere supplied only
too abundantly. Wheat bread was long unknown, and corn cakes of various
makings and bakings supplied its place. The most delicious morsel of all
was corn grated while still in the milk and fashioned into round cakes
eaten hot from the clapboard before the fire, or from the mysterious
depths of the Dutch oven, buried in coals and ashes on the hearth.
There was soon a great flow of milk from the kine that multiplied in the
pastures in the woods, and there was sweetening enough from the maple
tree and the bee tree, but salt was very scarce and very dear, and long
journeys were made through the perilous woods to and from the licks, or
salt springs, which the deer had discovered before the white man or the
red man knew them.

The bees which hived their honey in the hollow trees were tame bees
gone wild, and with the coming of the settlers, some of the wild things
increased so much that they became a pest. Such were the crows which
literally blackened the fields after the settlers plowed, and which the
whole family had to fight from the corn when it was planted. Such were
the rabbits, and such, above all, were the squirrels which overran the
farms, and devoured every green thing till the people combined in great
squirrel hunts and destroyed them by tens of thousands. The larger game
had meanwhile disappeared. The buffalo and the elk went first; the deer
followed, and the bear, and even the useless wolf. But long after these
the poisonous reptiles lingered, the rattlesnake, the moccasin, and
the yet deadlier copperhead; and it was only when the whole country was
cleared that they ceased to be a very common danger.

For a long time there were no mills to grind the corn, and it was
pounded into meal for bread with a heavy wooden pestle in a mortar made
by hollowing out some tough-grained log. The first mills were horse
power; then smal