Part 1 (2/2)

CHAPTER II

MY FIRST VOYAGE

My father and brothers constructed a ”prairie schooner” fro in early autumn, with the skeleton horse and cow harnessed tandem for motive poe all set sail for far-off Massachusetts

We slept beneath our canopy of canvas and blankets; those of our number able to do so worked occasionally for any ould hire, but employers were few, as this was one of the crazy seasons in the history of our Republic when the people voted for semi-free trade, and the mill wheels were nearly all silent for the benefit of the es when a drowning in the swift currents, and suffered froypsies stole our antediluvian horse and cow The barking of the faithful dog awakened father and brothers who rushed to the rescue, leaving th the ed, heads were broken, and after a fierce struggle and long wandering, lost in the woods, our fiery steeds were once more chained to our chariot wheels

The next day we came to a wide river which it was impossible to ford, but mercy, which sometimes ”tempers the blast to the shorn laundalow floating on the tide

Like Noah and faed to embark on this ancient ark, and paddled to the further shore

There weknife and toh the primeval forest, ere suddenly saluted by the ferocious hoop, and a dozen Indians barred our way, flourishi+ng their primitive iun sent the to cover, our steeds rushed forith a speed hitherto unknown, the prairie schooner rocked like a boat in a cyclone, the mother shrieked, the _enfant terrible_ howled like a bull of Bashan, and just as the ”Red devils”

were closing in from the rear, the mouth of a cave looasus and mooly cow” pell-mell

Our red adun and the blades of my brothers' axes Luckily the Indians had neither firearms nor bows and arrows They un wounded several, the axes intie when, with a tre of ”Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” a band of picturesquely arrayed whitethe trail The enemy took to their heels, and we learned that our rescuers had been to a William Henry Harrison parade and barbecue, for this was the tin

The Indians had been there too and, filling up with ”fire water,”

their former war-path proclivities had returned to their ”earnished” minds, to the extent that they yearned to decorate their belts with our scalps

Our preservers scattered to their ho the world to darkness and to us in the woods The woods, where Adam and Eve lived and loved, where Pan piped, and Satyrs danced, the opera house of birds; the woods, green, i--to the poet perhaps when all is well--but to us, they seemed haunted by spirits of evil, the yells of the de seemed to sympathize with the infinite pathos of our lives, and at last sleep, ”the brother of death,” folded us in his arms, and the curtain fell

”There is a place called Pillow-land, Where gales can never sweep Across the pebbles on the strand That girds the Sea of Sleep

'Tis here where grief lets loose the rein, And age forgets to weep, For all are children once again, Who cross the Sea of Sleep

The gates are ope'd at daylight close, When weary ones may creep, Lulled in the arms of sweet repose, Across the Sea of Sleep

Oh weary heart, and toil-worn hand, At eve comes rest to thee, When ply the boats to Pillow-land, Across the Sleepy sea

Thank God for this sweet Pillow-land, Where weary ones irds the Sea of Sleep”

It is pleasant in this sunset of life, to recall the testih all those troublous scenes, father andfaith in the ultiood and true, that their faces were often illumined as they repeated to each other those priceless words of the sweet singer,

”Drifting over a sunless sea, cold drearyover a dusty road with foes within and foes abroad, Weary, I cast hty to save even me, Jesus Thou Son of God”

At last the ”perils by land and perils by sea, and perils fro journey ended and we reached the promised land We halted in old Byfield, in the state of Massachusetts, orldly goods consisting of a bushel of barberries, threadbare toilets, and the ancient equipage dilapidated as aforesaid

After much tribulation, father took a farm ”on shares,” which was found to result in endless toil to us, and the lion's share of the crops going to the owners, who toiled not, neither did they spin, but reaped with gusto where we had sown