ld flowers than I have
seen in any other part of the world, and, laid up in the trunks of
hollow trees, were rich stores of wild honey.

"Except for ague we had little sickness, and for ordinary ailments
healing herbs waited everywhere for seeing eyes. These were calamus,
bloodroot, snakeroot, slippery elm, tansy, and scores that I do not
remember the names of. There was sumach for tanning and butternut for
dyeing; hickory wood for our fires and hard black walnut for our
house-building and fences. Everything that we needed for comfort or
health was within reach of our hands. Nor in this wholesome simple
life were the arts forgotten. Among us lived a poetess who is quoted
wherever English is spoken.[1] Theatricals were cultivated, and my
father belonged to a Thespian society. We had good painters, too, and
at this moment there hangs before me my father's portrait at the age
of twenty, done by Cox of Indianapolis, which has been praised and
admired by both French and English artists of reputation.

[Footnote 1: Sarah Tittle Bolton, known for her
patriotic and war songs, among them "Paddle Your Own
Canoe" and "Left on the Battlefield."]

"When we made maple sugar there were the great fires built
out-of-doors with logs that needed the strength of two men to carry;
the bubbling cauldrons, and the gay company of neighbors come to help;
the camp where the work went on all night to the sound of laughter and
song.

"And the woods, traversed by cool streams, where wild vines clambering
from tree to tree made bowers fit for any fairy queen--what a place of
enchantment for a child! There were may apples to be gathered and
buried to ripen, and as you turned up the earth there was always the
chance that you might find a flint arrowhead.

"Then, too, there were shell barks, hickory nuts, walnuts, and
butternuts to be gathered, husked and dried, an operation which
produced every fall a sudden eruption of the society of the 'Black
Hand' among the boys and girls. Haw apples, elderberries, wild
gooseberries, blackberries, and raspberries provided variety of
refreshment. Or you might, as I often did, gather the wild grapes from
over your head, press them in your hands, catch the juice in the neck
of a dried calabash, and toss off the blood-red wine. With my romantic
notions, imbibed from my reading, I always called it the blood-red
wine, though it was in reality a rather muddy looking gray-co