Trail of an Artist-Naturalist: The Autobiography of Ernest Thompson Seton

By Ernest Thompson Seton

“Trail of an Artist-Naturalist” is the 1940 Autobiography of Ernest Thompson Seton. Ernest Thompson Seton (1860 – 1946) was an English author and wildlife artist who founded the Woodcraft Indians in 1902. He was also among the founding members of the Boy Scouts of America, established in 1910. He wrote profusely on this subject, the most notable of his scouting literature including “The Birch Bark Roll” and the “Boy Scout Handbook”. Seton was also an early pioneer of animal fiction writing, and he is fondly remembered for his charming book “Wild Animals I Have Known” (1898). This volume constitutes a fascinating look into the life of a person who played an important role in the environmental and naturalist movement of a young North America, and it is not to be missed by those with an interest in the history of American Scouting. Other notable works by this author include: “Lobo, Rag and Vixen” (1899), “Two Little Savages” (1903), and “Animal Heroes” (1911). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528767149

Book preview

PART I

Childhood

I

THE MOULD THAT SHAPED THE MIND

IN the north of England, sixty-odd miles south of the Scottish Border, is the famous river Tyne, running easterly to empty into the North Sea. Nine miles up this is the great commercial city of Newcastle; and at the mouth of this river is the seaport of South Shields, famous for its harbour, its commerce, and its vast exports of coal. This was the home of my people, although nearly all were of Scottish origin. They had fled from Scotland after risking all and losing all in the Stuart Rebellion of 1745. Most were here hiding under assumed names and were slowly re-establishing their fortunes in the great game of the Merchant Marine.

The town of South Shields, some 40,000 in population, was divided into a great manufacturing district along the river, a large coal-mining and developing section on the hills, and finally, near the mouth of the river, and fronting on the sea, was a colony of men who had so far succeeded that they now owned one or more ships and were known as the Ship-owners. Both my grandfathers were in this class, so that in 1843, when my father, Joseph Logan, married Alice Snowdon, my mother, they began with comfort and prospects of affluence.

For his home, my father eventually built a substantial three-story brick house in Wellington Terrace (Number 6). Here it was that his fourteen children were born. I, number eleven, arrived on August 14, 1860.

From the windows on the south of this house was a wonderful view of wheatfields and meadows, with their pleasant variants of cows, sheep, goats, and hens on the grass, and skylarks singing in the sky, far away to Cledon and on towards Sunderland and down the coast to Souter Point, where moans the unearthly siren on fearful nights of fog. Our easterly view of the sea was shut off by bosky hills and terraced houses. But towards the north we could see across the mile-wide grey-green harbour flecked with boats, twinkling with winnowing gulls, away to the other shore, called Tynemouth. Here, stark and sombre, stood ever and unchanging the dark and towering ruin known as Tynemouth Abbey, a grim reminder of the Church’s power a thousand years ago, a grim reminder of the terror of the Vikings, the Sea Kings, in those same days so long gone by. For here it was that Red Eric landed with his husky berserks clanging their shields and flashing their spears; here, after he had gathered at his will all that appealed, he had set the torch; and all he left is what we see today.

In this setting, or near by, it was that my people dwelt for several generations.

Monsignor (later Archbishop) Robert Seton of New Jersey, the historian of the family, points out that all the Setons were sportsmen and had literary tastes and gifts; so, as he said to me: Blood will tell. You are a true scion of the line and impelled by its best traditions and interests.

On the Cameron side I had a similar inheritance; all the Camerons were hunters—often man-hunters—and our remote ancestor Evan Cameron of Lochiel was the most famous wolf-hunter of his day. One by one he hunted down the wolf-packs that ravaged the highland herds, and in the final round-up it was his sturdy arm that drove the spear through the last grim leader of the wolves and ended forever the menace of the wolf in Scotland. The middle name Evan that my parents conferred on me was in memory of this famous wolf-hunting ancestor.

Among the Seton family traditions of our home circle was one relating to Fighting Geordie. He was a famous warrior in numberless Scottish battles and border feuds, and yet it was commonly said that he did all his best fighting when confronted with disastrous defeat. When his comrades were unnerved and appalled by the apparent hopelessness of their situation, the spirit of a demon, a giant, entered into Geordie, and he led them to the fray with such courage, force, and fury that never once was he wholly defeated.

Many times in life’s battles when all the cards and chances seemed against me, when the last light of hope was flickering low, I have found comfort in the thought: Now they strike the fibre I inherit from ‘Fighting Geordie.’ He never gave up, was never defeated, and won, as I will now, against hostile combinations that seemed invincible. He never gave up, never was licked, and I will leave the self-same record behind.

Gods! how many times that very thought has rearranged my battle-front and given me first the victory in my soul, then triumph in the world I lived in.

My father (born September 6, 1821) was an honourable man of high ideals and remarkable personal force. He was proud of his noble descent; but often he checked himself speaking of these things, as they savoured of worldly vain-glory.

By nature refined and scholarly, he loved books and art, and had aspired to a university career. But my grandfather, a rugged man of the business world, could not see the need of it. He had made his own fortune out of a small inheritance, and had had only a grammar-school education. So he bluntly told my father that he himself had succeeded without a university career, and he did not propose one for his son.

Later, however, he changed his mind in some measure, for he put his second son, Evan, through Durham University. Father’s aspirations had to be satisfied with a private tutor, thanks to whom he was made a good Latin scholar, a clever pencil artist, and a master of French, which last accomplishment was rounded off by a prolonged sojourn in France.

When, about 1837, the time came for my father to select a profession, his choice was to be a civil engineer for construction of the railroads that were then beginning to be talked of. My grandfather’s reply was simple and final: All nothing but nonsense. The railways are a mere fad, and will soon be done away with. Yes, within three years; and then we shall be entirely back to the horses and coaches again. And so the matter was ended, on the assumption that my father would take up the calling of his people, and devote his energies to ship-owning and ship-brokerage.

All who knew him agree in describing him as a very unusual man, with standards of life and conduct in the world that were of the highest, and inflexibly adhered to throughout life. His word was acknowledged to be as good as his bond, and he had no vices.

He had, however, one or two peculiarities which did not vanish with age. He was very indolent, had a marked craving for proper respect; and was, I think, the most selfish person I ever heard of or read of in history or in fiction. He was so selfish that he thought himself generous in feeding his family, so important that the most vital interests of his family were always cheerfully sacrificed to his most trifling passing convenience. His own father had been a masterful rugged man and a stern disciplinarian; therefore my father, not considering that he was treated with proper respect at home, had left the paternal roof at the age of twenty-two, and married Alice Snowdon, my mother, then twenty years of age (born December 1, 1823).

Mother was a beautiful woman with a strange diversity of gifts—profoundly religious, full of energy, yet weak in character; and before they had been wedded a month, they two were one—and that one was my father.

PROMPTLY nine months after the marriage, my eldest brother arrived; and then as speedily as Dame Nature allowed, other brothers followed in true Victorian succession. So that, not counting three might-have-beens that were ended by accidents, we were a family of eleven children in eighteen years. One only was a girl, and she died at the age of six, leaving Mother with ten sons—a grim satire on her expressed girlish view that she hated men-folk, and hoped when she grew up to be a widow with two daughters.

It was as far as possible from Mother’s wish to have such a swarm of children, but she had no say in that or any other leading matter.

So, in the winter of 1859–60, finding that she was once more conforming to a certain Scriptural injunction about replenishing the earth, she said to the family doctor: I did not want any more (having now had ten); but since I have no choice, I should like to have this one amount to something. What can I do to endow the child with better gifts than common?

The old doctor replied: All you can do is take care of your health, keep yourself calm and quite free from any nervous upset, and fix your mind on your highest ideals.

Strictly and with absolute self-effacement, my mother lived up to the letter and spirit of these injunctions. As soon as springtime came, she went every morning with the nurse, and took a dip in the North Sea, which rolled on the flat beach in view of our upper windows. She studied her health in every way, avoided all excitement; and in addition to her daily Bible-reading, selected Ernest Maltravers, then newly published, to crystallize her ideals. Maltravers was a country gentleman, a hunter, a sportsman, and, in the field sense, a naturalist. Mother soaked her mind in its pages, hoping that her child would be shaped along just such lines, would be an outdoors man, a sportsman, and a naturalist—and, above all, would inherit the spirit of his great ancestor, Evan Cameron, the mighty wolf-hunter of the North.

With unfaltering devotion, she went every day all summer long for the bracing salt-water dip. One day in July, there was such a heavy sea on that old Ellen, the nurse, said: I think, ma’am, you better not go in today. It is too rough.

But Mother replied: I must go in for the child’s sake.

So, clad in the preposterous, impossible, atrocious, and perilous long bathing-robe of that time, she waded into the surf ahead of the nurse. A giant roller came booming in and knocked her off her feet. Then the undercurrent sucked her quickly towards the sea. She screamed, the nurse dashed to the rescue, and was just able to seize Mother by her long black hair as it floated free.

She was quickly brought to the shore, where she fainted. A neighbouring bather brought a cab, and Mother was taken home, to bathe in the surf no more that summer.

The result of this shock—at least so they said—was that the baby came some weeks ahead of time, and had a horror of the sea, of all water, indeed. His nine brothers loved their daily bath, and fought to stay in it. He screamed at the sight of it, and for two years never allowed them to put him in.

Another consequence of the adventure—at least, so said the nurse—was this: although the nine brothers were bald at birth, he alone had a heavy crop of curly black hair.

This was the prenatal history of the one who arrived at 3 A.M., August 14, 1860, and who, from his mother’s literary choice and ancestral pride, was destined to bear the name Ernest Evan.

NONE of my brothers had any trace of the interest in wild life that was at all times an absorbing passion with me. Mother used to say that, no matter how hard I bumped my baby head or tumbled on my small round nose, she could instantly choke my howls by saying, Look, there’s a birdie. But, if no providential birdie happened to be in sight, a fly on the pane would serve the same purpose, though in less degree.

If she wished me to keep still for a long time, she wrapped me in a green shawl, the plaid of the Cameron Clan, and made me sit on her bed, back to a corner-post, and said: Now you are a tree. Trees do not move. And there I would sit playing the role for a long, long time.

One of my vivid early memories was of a visit to Rothbury in Northumberland, where my father, strong in the family tradition of sport, used to go for the salmon-fishing. I must have been three, because I remember it so clearly; and yet not four, for at that time the luxury of fishing as a sport had ceased for us.

I remember the great, rolling, grassy hills dotted over with sheep, and the winding path with a low wooden bench near by. One morning two lambs lay sleeping on this bench. All my hunter instincts were aroused by the opportunity. I eagerly toddled ahead to catch them. The lambs jumped off when I was three or four feet away; but still it was a supreme moment, almost a glorious success. For long after, I would renew the thrills of that adventurous happy day by telling how I very nearly caught two little lammies.

The seagulls, white and winnowing over the harbour, were familiar and daily sights; but when an elder brother brought one with a crippled wing to be kept in the greenhouse tank, it furnished a new wonder that I used to watch in big-eyed fascination not unmixed with fear, for it was said to bite like a dog.

As I grew old enough to enjoy the standard nursery tales, my favourites were Red Riding-hood and the Wolf and The Wolf and the Seven Kids. Though, low be it spoken—and I tell it with a sense of guilt—in each I had a measure of sympathy for the wolf. I felt that his case was not properly presented; he acted strictly within the law, and on each occasion he got a very raw deal.

IN my sixth year, while yet we lived in England, an event occurred which I think was full of character values, at least in forecast; and shows, moreover, how close akin are the hunter and the naturalist. Furthermore, it demonstrated in me the hunter blood of my clan.

We lived in No. 6 Wellington Terrace. Next door, to the west, was a family named Hewison; next, my uncle John Snowdon; next, my uncle Lee. My eldest cousin, Harry Lee, had some pet hens, which strayed, as hens will stray, into the adjoining yard of Uncle Snowdon.

My cousin, Willie Snowdon, aged seven, and I, aged five, discovered this unjustifiable foreign invasion. All our warrior and hunter instincts were aroused. We felt that we were, and ought to be, fierce barbarians, repelling a foreign foe, or Highlanders driving back the invading Saxons; or at least, primitive hunters, pursuing their lawful prey.

In the outhouse were a number of long pointed irons, used for setting lines in the harbour for overnight fishing. Armed each with one of these, we set forth to attack the enemy. We were wild men, hunting wild birds, and thrilled to realize in ourselves certain pictures, recently displayed, of Kaffirs with assegais, running down and spearing ostriches.

Among the trees of the back yard and through the elder shrubbery we chased them. It was gloriously exhilarating; and when the squawking hens, losing breath and courage, tried to hide in the dark lurksome corners, we closed in joyously, shouted, and speared them to their death.

Then, what a change! I can smell those bloody feathers yet, and hear the voice from the window: What are you doing to those hens?

The revulsion of feeling, the futile remorse, the dreadful scene with my father, the useless tears, the terrible spanking with my father’s slipper, the promise never, never to do such a wicked thing again—oh, it is so clearly graven on the tablets of my brain!

Why did we do it? I don’t know; I only know that we did, and madly joyed in it for the time, gripped in a wild animalism that was as surprising to us as it was ancient in our blood.

Those hens belonged to Harry Lee, my big cousin. How I dreaded to meet him now, or even to hear his name!

Two or three days later, I was going down town with my mother, when who should join us but our much-wronged cousin, Harry Lee, big, handsome and boyish, although already a grown man.

I hid behind my mother; I covered my guilty face with a fold of her dress. I expected him to pounce on me and avenge his murdered hens.

Mother said: Speak to him, Harry. He has been thoroughly whipped for his naughtiness, and he is properly contrite.

So Harry came and took me by the hand, and said: Never mind, Ernie, you didn’t mean to do it. Now, never mind, you take this, and handed me a lolly-pop. Then he laughed, and strode away to his work.

His father was a ship-owner, and Harry was learning the business from the ground up. He was working in the shipyard.

Arrived at his job, he needed a certain tool. Distrusting the boy messenger, he said: You are too slow! I’ll get it myself.

He leaped over the side of the hull, on to a scaffold. The loose end sprang, flung him into the air. He fell twenty feet, landed on his head; and, half an hour after he had forgiven me, he was dead.

MY father, indeed all my near kin, were ship-owners in the Merchant Marine. Father owned a dozen of these sailing-ships, and in years of good luck was very prosperous. Much turned on the vessel itself, but even more on the captain. Father was highly thought of by his men, so that when he got a good captain, that man stayed. Thus, we had good captains in charge of our dozen sailing-vessels, and on most years fortune smiled. A successful voyage, indeed, meant a hundred per cent on the outlay.

Then came a turn. One of our vessels missed stays three times, that is, failed to respond to her rudder, so ran aground, in crawling up the Bristol Channel; which meant three unloadings, and a dead loss at the end. Another was seized and burned by Negro pirates off the coast of Guinea. One vessel went down in the Indian Seas. Next a captain turned bad. Then a business-man whose notes Father had endorsed went broke. Blow after blow fell quickly; and a goodly fortune, for those days, was wiped out.

All of this I heard long afterwards. At the time I knew only that we were going to Canada. Pictures of log houses with pointed spruce-trees all around, and bears and wolves in the background, gave me thrills of mixed interest and fear.

II

A NEW HOME IN CANADA

I WAS not quite six when we left England. I can clearly see yet the bustle of preparation in that summer of 1866—Father, Mother, twelve sons (for two more came after I did), and my cousin Polly Burfield, then eighteen years old, adopted as a sister. I see yet the piles and piles of boxes all lashed with strong, tarry rope that told of the ship tradition. I can still smell the cats in that cheap lodging in Glasgow where we spent a day and a night before going aboard the St. Patrick, a steamer bound for Quebec.

The strongest impression of this three weeks’ voyage is of rats. There were rats everywhere; and our state-room was the meeting-place where they came for their social pleasures, at least it seemed so to me.

Quebec lives in my memory only as a big rock that blocked the back windows of the hotel, where we had sour bread to eat. There was talk of a wonderful pet bear kept by the blacksmith, but I did not see it—which left a twinge of regret.

Of the long five-hundred-mile journey through interminable swamps of spruce and tamarack to Lindsay, Ontario, I remember only one night. As we were preparing to sleep in the train, Father told us to look out, and we saw an amazing sight—the woods full of shooting stars. They were everywhere, some close to the train, blazing, twinkling, sailing about. When the wonder had sunk in, Father told us they were not shooting stars, but little insects called fire-flies, each of which carried a lantern. It was one of those delicious rare moments when your dream fairy comes to you, and you know it is really truly true.

July and August of 1866 we spent in Lindsay town. I can visualize it now—wooden sidewalks, huge pine-stumps everywhere with vigorous young cedars growing about their roots; barefooted, bare-headed boys and girls scoffing at our un-Canadian accent. Apple-trees laden with fruit to which we soon learned to help ourselves; tall rank weeds, with swarms of grasshoppers everywhere; the coffee-coloured river with its screaming roaring, sawmills; cows and pigs on the main street; great, hulking, heaving oxen drawing loads of hay, with heavy breathings that were wonderfully meadow-like and fragrant; and over and above all, in memory as in place, the far-pervading, sweet, sanctifying smell of new-cut boards of pine.

Father came prepared for the life of an English country gentleman. He proposed to take a huge tract of virgin forest, with a lake in it, build a castle on the lake, and live the life; so brought his library, his scientific instruments and a dozen different sporting guns.

We had come to live, at least in part, the lives of hunters. I think Mayne Reid and Swiss Family Robinson were the principal guide-books that my father had consulted, but Robinson Crusoe was not overlooked.

Yet we were doomed to continual disappointment; the hunter-dream faded slowly but surely.

Mother’s instinct was to go slow, to try it first in a little place, to make sure that this was what we wished to do. Mother’s views had no weight whatever, but the opinions and advice of sundry businessmen in Lindsay had. So we bought a partly cleared hundred-acre farm on Stony Creek, only three or four miles east of the town, but in the virgin woods.

The whole family went to see it and had a picnic. Down in the glorious woods by the creek, in a superb beaver meadow, surrounded by tall elms making Gothic aisles around us, we lighted our camp-fire, the first of my life.

My older brothers shot some red squirrels for a hunter’s pie; they were so eager to be hunters. The strange animal smell of those hot little bodies comes back to me yet, with the sweet and holy fragrance of the balsam-trees about us.

The ride back to Lindsay I shall never forget, for one of the livery team that brought us went balky, and refused to draw an ounce. We had to get out and walk, while a neighbour, Johnny Hoban (or Holborn), came and applied the lash. But it was one Jim Farrell who finally supplied the horse that brought us home. The road at the place went through a cedar swamp, and the whip that the driver used was a fresh-cut young cedar; and ever since, the exquisite perfume of that tree brings the whole scene to my mind.

We moved out to our backwoods farm that September. It had a small house—the usual pioneer log shanty—and a few ramshackle outbuildings, the handiwork of Bill McKenna, who had first staked the claim.

The house was very small for us, very badly prepared for winter, and swarming with rats.

SOON after that, in the autumn of 1866, we had our first wildwood thrill. A neighbour named Pat Cunningham came shouting to us: Get out all your guns; there’s a deer down in your woods.

Father and all the big boys but two rushed off fully armed to join the chase. The second and third brothers, Willie and Joe, took no part in it, but went with their axes to another part of the woods.

They were cutting a small tree, when Willie said: See, there’s a deer. Sure enough, it stood there, gazing at them, with eyes and ears, only thirty yards away.

Joe said: I’m going for a gun. Willie, always a very cool person, said: Save yourself the trouble; it won’t stay one minute.

You watch and I’ll go, said Joe.

Away he went; and when he came back, the deer was still staring. With one shot through the heart, he laid it low.

In half an hour all the colony were on the spot, to acclaim the successful hunter. There was a little reaction when they found it was a harmless doe. I remember how soft she felt as I put my arms around her furry neck and between her hind legs, to discover that she was fashioned there like a small cow. The eyes still looked bright and alive, though she was stone-dead.

I heard one of the men say that she was with young, and eagerly asked: Why didn’t they catch them? and visioned at once the joy of a pet fawn. But the man looked away with a curious expression, and did not answer my question.

A few minutes later I knew, as I watched the disembowelling, that the young were unborn. Then I resented the attitude of that man. For, though just six, I knew already where the little ones came from, and thought that those men did not take proper note of my age and experience.

The man showed us the scent between the deer’s toes, a strange musky smell that I never forgot. My nose must have been better than common, for my memory was more gripped by smell than by appeals to other senses.

THE log schoolhouse was a mile away; but I was six years old and, with my eight-year-old brother, was sent every morning to nine o’clock school, to sit for six hours at the feet of a tremendous person. So she seemed to me, for she was grown up; she knew everything; she was the schoolmistress. I learned to know Agnes O’Leary better some years later. She had been only a bright young girl of sixteen then; often in winter she had scholars much older than herself.

The little log building was warmed by a box stove, for which the bigger boys had to cut wood at recess (pronounced reé-cess in those days). During school hours it was fed by anyone the teacher selected for the honour.

One epoch-marking day, as the fire got low, Miss O’Leary said: Ernest, put a stick of wood in the stove.

Proud, but awe-stricken, I marched across the floor with a stick, opened the door and threw it in.

No, said the teacher, that is not the way. Johnny Blackwell, show how it should be done.

With the swagger that was justified by superior knowledge and superior years (for he was six and a half), Johnny pulled out my stick. With the poker he raked the glowing coals to the front, set the stick on them, closed the door, opened the dampers with a bang; then, giving me a withering glance of pity and contempt, marched haughtily to his seat.

I never forgot that lesson in woodcraft, especially as the fire began to roar immediately.

An incident that profoundly impressed me was a reading from Franklin’s Polar Sea. A white bear with two cubs had ventured near the ship. One cub was shot, the mother wounded. She led the other little one off, but she came back moaning to caress the dead one. Finding it could not follow, she set out to carry it away. Meantime, the other kept calling. So she left the dead one, and ran to help the living. It came back also, and was shot. The mother fondled and licked the two little bodies. She kept looking up at the ship and moaning, as if pleading for mercy. Refusing to flee, she was herself shot dead beside them.

The big boys reading the story were wholly engrossed with the words: P-o-l, pole, a-r, ar, Polar; w-o-u-n-d-e-d, wounded; and so on. But at the desk behind the standing line of readers was I—the only one of the crowd who seemed to feel it—with tears in my eyes and with a choking sorrow in my throat over the fate of the noble old mother bear.

This daily two miles, to school and back, was not a serious matter in fine weather. But winter was coming, there was ice on the ditches, and soon the snow came down. At first it was fun to trudge through it; but the weather got colder, and in late November I was so benumbed coming home one dark evening that I gave up and lay down in the snow. I don’t remember it very clearly. I had been terribly cold, and now felt irresistibly sleepy. My older brother Arthur, with me, seemed to sense the danger; and used every means, including threats of violence, to get me home. This experience ended my winter schooling for that season.

III

PIONEER LESSONS

WE had brought with us from England two wholly different dogs: Snap, a wire-haired Scottish terrier (twenty pounds), and Sailor, a very large brown retriever, weighing nearly seventy-five pounds.

Snap was the offspring of a famous ratter, whose record, we were told, was killing a hundred rats in three minutes. Of course, the rats were captives and in a cockpit surrounded by applauding sportsmen in sympathy with the terrier and despising the rats. All the terrier had to do with each rat was seize, shake and drop, and repeat, seize, shake, and drop. Snap’s exact time I am not sure of.

Snap was the constant companion of us children, and took part in all our woodland pursuits. He was particularly successful in treeing squirrels and cats for us to study.

Next summer we discovered a new wild animal in the woods. Snap, our fighting terrier, had covered himself with glory by killing—with the help of two men and an axe—a five-pound woodchuck, or groundhog, as some called it. The creature was paraded for all to see. I was six and a half at the time; but to this day I can smell that peculiar musky smell as I think of it, I recall the flexible animalism of its lithe body, and see the three little white-capped glands that were thrust out of its anus. Its fur is better pictured in my mind than any since; and with me yet is the mixed sense of attraction and disgust it conjured up.

Snap never hesitated to attack savagely any man, boy, or animal who approached us with a suggestion of hostility.

Sailor was not an admirable character; big and strong, he was also much of a bully. He and Snap had several set-to’s over food, but their big showdown came when Sailor, for some unknown reason, showed his teeth and came with savage growls at us children.

In a flash, Snap went at him, and played the one fighting card that could give him victory. Without a moment’s hesitation, he sprang for the big dog and clinched on his nose with a grip like an iron vice. In vain the big dog growled and struggled. He could toss the little dog about but he could not free his own snout from that desperate clutch, nor could he in any way bring his own powerful jaws to bear on the enemy.

Then the big dog gave in, and yelled for mercy. My big brothers tried to pull the little dog off; two pulled at the big dog’s tail and one at the little dog’s hind legs. But still the iron grip remained until, at the suggestion of a neighbour, both dogs were plunged, head down, into the rain-water vat that stood under the rain-spout of the house.

Then only did Snap relax. Both dogs were dragged out, snorting water and gasping for breath.

Sailor was the only dog I ever knew that was treacherous and dangerous to his own master and the master’s family. My father, determined to be boss of everything on the farm, had Sailor tied up short to a post, where Father went at him with a heavy horsewhip, and lashed him till the dog’s defiant growls gave place to yelps of pain and whines of surrender.

About this time several of the neighbours came with complaints that a big brown dog was killing their sheep, and by various detective tricks they assembled proof that the criminal was our dog Sailor.

These incidents, together with the attack on us children, settled his fate. He was disposed of to a butcher who had need of a fierce watchdog. This the big dog was well fitted to be, when tied up in a yard, and so far as I know he continued in this un-ideal job to the day of his death.

My present-day explanation of this unprecedented dog treachery on the part of Sailor is that he had been taken away from his real master, the man who raised him, and handed over, when several years old, to another, so that he did not know to whom his allegiance really did belong. I have never known of a dog who was treacherous or false to the master who raised him from a pup.

Snap served to the end of his days as the honoured guardian of us children.

MOTHER had been used to an ample house and a staff of competent servants. Now she and my cousin Polly were doing all the housework, as well as milking some of the cows; and the whole of us roughing it in one log shanty, composed of a big living-room, with a little box-room for Father and Mother in a corner, one for my cousin in another; and the rest of us in hammocks, or upstairs in a big loft through which the wind and weather romped as out of doors, and snow drifted across our bed-clothes.

Father had planned to build a convenient house with part of his remaining capital. It must be roomy; is it not to be our home for life? was the oft-repeated phrase.

The new house, a plain, substantial, two-story, eleven-room brick barn, forty by sixty feet, was begun in August, 1866, and finished in January, 1867, for the amazing sum of a thousand dollars. Yes, that was how we reckoned in those days. Seventy-five dollars per room, for a plain-built house. But labourers worked from 7 A.M. till 6 P.M., and got seventy-five cents; skilled labour, a dollar and twenty-five cents for a ten-hour day. Butter was ten cents a pound; eggs, six to eight cents a dozen; pork, four cents, and the best beef, eight to ten cents a pound. Board and lodging was a dollar and fifty cents a week. A good hired man got ten dollars a month and his keep; he worked from dawn until after dark—and was happy. We have changed things now, and have not improved them much, except in shortening the hours.

We moved into this brick barn in January, 1867. Every stick and brick in its building is bright in my memory. Every smell of lime, lumber, or dank, chill room is strong in my consciousness today.

THE winter came with hard frost and ever-deepening snow; but we had a large open fire with plenty of wood. Father and the older boys were off in the forest cutting cordwood every day. We four little fellows stayed at home and played in the workshop.

This workshop was a large room reserved at the north-east corner of the house. It was planned for carpenter work chiefly; it was the realm of the nail and the glue-pot. But we learned there how to handle leather, glass, and metals as well. It was our college of handicraft.

As I look back on the experiences of that place, I rate them among the very best of my life-training.

One of the first lessons I learned was to hold up the end of a plank which my big brother was sawing in two. I, naturally, wanted to bear down, so as to hasten the operation; and was surprised to hear him say: No, no, don’t press down! That would break it off, and leave a long splinter, maybe split both pieces. Hold it up level, so I can saw it quite through. I never forgot that little lesson.

Another was to turn the weary, weary grindstone. I wondered why he made me turn against the edge of the axe; that seemed likely to blunt it more. But he showed me that turning the other way made a false or wire edge. I learned also that to grind without water soon heats the steel, and robs it of its temper.

There I learned why nails must be set zigzag in the wood, for if two are set in the same line or grain, it is likely to split. I remember to this day the shock I got when, many years later, I saw a green hand nail up a board with all the nails in one line of grain.

I learned that a small hole in a piece of hardwood, burnt bigger with a red-hot iron, is a better, stronger hole than one bored the full size at the outset. I learned to love the strong look of the seared wood and the delicious incense of the wood-smoke.

I learned to tie a square or reef knot, and to make a blind lashing.

I learned that window-glass, held under cold water, may be cut by a pair of strong, sharp scissors; that this, indeed, was the method of the monks in making their stained-glass windows.

I learned to make moulds for rifle-balls, for anchors, for wheels, for ship keels; then melt the lead—of which we had a store—and pour it into them with success.

I learned that brittle cut-nails may be softened by fire and slow cooling, so that they bend and clinch like wrought iron.

Our youngest brother was a mere baby; but we all learned to do simple carpentering; to use, or abuse, the standard tools. We were taught the difference between a rip- and a cross-cut saw, and why; between centre bit, auger bit, and shell bit. The differences between adze and axe, awl and scratch-awl, plane and jack-plane, hewing axe and splitting axe, were part of our routine lives.

Work with sharp tools was our daily engrossment now; and often-times the grown-up brother would insist that, before we began, we have a rag and a string ready as first aid for the inevitable cut fingers. I do not think that there was one day in all those four years that some one of us was not nursing a cut.

AXES and axemanship loomed large and ever larger in the world we had entered. The sweep of a handle, the width, weight, and heft were studied as much at least as Saracen ever studied the curves and metal of his blade.

I do not suppose that the modern boy has any idea that every hairs-breadth curve in a good axe-helve is the product of a million little experiments, a million careful thinkings-out, and that every timber that grows in the woods has been tried in turn, and tested by results. Of all the fifty kinds available, only hickory, white ash, and white oak were considered successful. But white ash was easily broken by a lubberly side wrench, white oak was too limber, and hickory had no spring. So said the experts. Each kind had its advocates, just as each fine curve—the sway-back, the handle-bulge, the backhand comeback, the blade shaft and the bulging helve—each had its champion.

But I suspect that all wise woodmen who can get it now prefer to use white hickory of sapling growth.

Hickory was scarce in our region; and my oldest brother, Enoch, with the courage of complete ignorance, decided to strike out an original path, and spent three days making an axe-helve of sugar-maple. It was perfect in line, scraped to a finish with broken glass, then polished with an oiled rag. I can see him yet go proudly forth to show those old timber-doodles something new. With all his force he drove the strong, three-pound blade into a log—and the handle shattered in his grasp, fell in three pieces.

What a little thing it was! But how it bit into the waxen tablets of my fresh young memory—far more than did the Spanish War or the retreat from Mons, in later life.

One day a neighbour, Jim Hussey by name, came and taught us how to make a sliver-broom out of blue beech, by cutting eighteen-inch slivers near one end, then bending them and binding them back beyond that end. Another showed us the mystery of bending wood for the bow of an ox-yoke by boiling it. He also made a bull-toggle; that is, a wooden clamp for the bull’s nose, by boiling the hickory so that it bent like lead, then drying it so it set like iron.

I learned the grain and merits of the common woods round about: that bass-wood was easy cutting and splitting, but miserable as timber and worthless as fuel, yet delightful to carve into animals, or to make troughs for catching maple-sap. I learned that beech and maple were our best firewood (hickory was too scarce for such use); that cedar, though the weakest and lightest of timber, perfectly useless where strength was needed, was wonderful for shingles, everlasting as a post, and inflammable as oiled rags when used for kindling-wood.

I learned that hickory is the strongest wood in the forest, and yet rots in three years if set in the ground.

I learned that hemlock knots were the hardest thing that grows, and would break the face of an axe as a stone would; and the better the axe, the surer its ruin in such an encounter.

I learned that I must never carry an axe on my shoulder with the blade towards me.

I learned to hold a lantern correctly, the test and proof being, if you can see, the workman can see.

I learned to hold a bag open with hand-grip, and square-mouthed, by extending the forefinger of each hand under the rim.

I learned that a very thick coat of paint takes a week to dry; while a very thin coat dries in a day,