Читать книгу The Busy Life of Eighty-Five Years of Ezra Meeker - Ezra Meeker Meeker - Страница 7

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CHILDHOOD DAYS.

My mother said I was "always the busiest young'en she ever saw," which meant I was restless from the beginning—born so.

According to the best information obtainable, I was born in a log cabin, where the fireplace was nearly as wide as the cabin. The two doors on opposite sides admitted the horse, dragging the backlog, to enter in one, and go out at the other, and of course the solid puncheon floor defied injury from rough treatment.

The crane swung to and fro to regulate the bubbling mush in the pot. The skillet and dutch oven occupied places of favor, instead of the cook stove, to bake the pone or johnny cake, or to parch the corn, or to fry the venison, which was then obtainable in the wilds of Ohio.

A curtain at the farther end of the cabin marked the confines of a bed chamber for the "old folk", while the elder children climbed the ladder nailed to the wall to the loft of loose clapboard that rattled when trod upon and where the pallets were so near the roof that the patter of the rain made music to the ear, and the spray of the falling water, not infrequently, would baptize the "tow-heads" left uncovered.

Mother used to give us boys mush and milk for supper, and only that, and then turned us out to romp or play or do up chores as the case might be, and sometimes as I now think of it, we must almost have made a burden of life for her, but she always seemed to think that anything we did in the way of antics was funny and about right.

It is mete to recall to mind that this date (of my birth) 1830, was just after the first railroad was built (1826) in the United States, just after friction matches were discovered (1827), just when the first locomotive was run (1829), and "daguerreotype" was invented. Following these came the McCormick reaper, immortalizing a name; the introduction of photography (1839), and finally the telegraph (1844) to hand down the name of Morse to all future generations as long as history is recorded. Then came the sewing machine (1846) to lighten the housewife's labor and make possible the vast advance in adornment in dress.

The few pioneers left will remember how the teeth were "yanked" out, and he must "grin and bear it" until chloroform came into use (1847), the beginning of easing the pain in surgical work and the near cessation of blood-letting for all sorts of ills to which the race was heir.

The world had never heard of artesian wells until after I was eleven years old (1841). Then came the Atlantic cable (1858), and the discovery of coal oil (1859). Time and events combined to revolutionize the affairs of the world. I well remember the "power" printing press (the power being a sturdy negro turning a crank), in a room where I worked a while as "the devil" in Noel's office in Indianapolis (1844) that would print 500 impressions an hour, and I have recently seen the monster living things that would seem to do almost everything but think, run off its 96,000 of completed newspapers in the same period of time, folded and counted.

The removal to "Lockland", alongside the "raging canal", seemed only a way station to the longer drive to Indiana, the longest walk of my life in my younger days, which I vividly remember to this day, taken from Lockland, ten miles out from Cincinnati, to Attica, Indiana a distance approximately of two hundred miles, when but nine years old, during the autumn of 1839. With the one wagon piled high with the household goods and mother with two babies, one yet in arms. There was no room in the wagon for the two boys, my brother Oliver Meeker, eleven years old, and myself, as already stated but nine. The horses walked a good brisk gait and kept us quite busy to keep up, but not so busy as to prevent us at times from throwing stones at squirrels or to kill a garter snake or gather flowers for mother and baby, or perhaps watch the bees gathering honey or the red-headed woodpeckers pecking the trees. Barefooted and bareheaded with tow pants and checkered "linsy woolsy" shirt and a strip of cloth for "galluses", as suspenders were then called, we did present an appearance that might be called primitive. Little did we think or care for appearance, bent as we were upon having a good time, and which we did for the whole trip. One dreary stretch of swamp that kept us on the corduroy road behind the jolting wagon was remembered which Uncle Usual Meeker, who was driving the wagon, called the "Big Swamp", which I afterwards learned was near Crawfordsville, Indiana. I discovered on my recent trip with the ox-team that the water of the swamp is gone, the corduroy gone, the timber as well, and instead great barns and pretentious homes have taken their places and dot the landscape as far as the eye can reach.

One habit we boys acquired on that trip stuck to us for life; until the brother was lost in the disaster of the steamer Northerner, January 5, 1861, 23 years after the barefoot trip. We followed behind the wagon part of the time and each took the name of the horse on his side of the road. I was "Tip" and on the off side, while the brother was "Top" and on the near side. "Tip" and "Top", a great big fat span of grey horses that as Uncle Usual said "would run away at the drop of a hat" was something to be proud of and each would champion his favorite ahead of him. We built castles in the air at times as we trudged along, of raising chickens, of getting honey bees, such as we saw at times on the road; at other times it would be horses and then lambs, if we happened to see a flock of sheep as we passed by—anything and everything that our imagination would conjure and which by the way made us happy and contented with our surroundings and the world at large. This habit of my brother's walking on the near side and I on the off side continued, as I have said, to the end of his life, and we were much together in after life in Indiana, on the plains, and finally here in Washington. We soon, as boys, entered into partnership, raising a garden, chickens, ducks, anything to be busy, all of which our parents enjoyed, and continued our partnership till manhood and until his death parted us. It is wonderful how those early recollections of trivial matters will still be remembered until old age overtakes us, while questions of greater importance encountered later on in life escape our memory and are lost.