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Page 73
In one way the tulip-tree is closely connected with the most picturesque
and interesting period of American development. I mean the period of
"hewed-log" houses. Here and there among the hills of Indiana, Ohio,
Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, there remains one of those low,
heavy, lime-chinked structures, the best index of the first change from
frontier-life, with all its dangers and hardships, to the peace and
contentment of a broader liberty and an assured future. In fact, to my
mind, a house of hewed tulip-logs, with liberal stone chimneys and heavy
oaken doors, embowered in an old gnarled apple-and cherry-orchard,
always suggests a sort of simple honesty and hospitality long since
fallen into desuetude, but once the most marked characteristic of the
American people. It is hard to imagine any meanness or illiberality
being generated in such a house. Patriotism, domestic fidelity, and
spotless honesty used to sit before those broad fireplaces wherein the
hickory logs melted to snowy ashes. The men who hewed those logs "hewed
to the line" in more ways than one. Their words, like the bullets from
their flint-locked rifles, went straight to the point. The women, too,
they of the "big wheel" and the "little wheel," who carded and spun and
wove, though they may have been a trifle harsh and angular, were
diamond-pure and the mothers of vigorous offspring.
I often wonder if there may not be a perfectly explainable connection
between the decay or disappearance of the forests and the evaporation,
so to speak, of man's rugged sincerity and earnestness. Why should not
the simple ingredients that make up the worldly part of our souls and
bodies be found in all their purity where nature's reservoir has never
been disturbed or its contents tainted? Why may not the subtile force
that develops the immense tulip-tree and clothes it with such a starry
mantle have power also to invigorate and intensify the life of man? "I
was rocked in a poplar trough," was the politician's boast a generation
ago. Such a declaration might mean a great deal if the sturdy, towering
strength of the tree out of which the trough was dug could have been
absorbed by the embryo Congressman. The "oldest inhabitant" of every
Western neighborhood recollects the "sugar-trough" used in the
maple-sap-gathering season, ere the genuine "sugar-camp" had been
abandoned. Young tulip-trees about fifteen inches in diameter were cut
down and their boles sawed into lengths of three feet. These were split
in two, and made into troughs by hollowing the faces and charring them
over a fire. During the bright spring days of sugar-making the young
Western mother would wrap her sturdy babe in its blanket and put it in a
dry sugar-trough to sleep while she tended the boiling syrup. A man born
sixty years ago in the region of tulip-trees and sugar-camps was
probably cradled in a "poplar" trough; and there were those born who
would now be sixty years old if they had not in unwary infancy tumbled
into the enormous rainwater-troughs with which every well-regulated
house was furnished. I have seen one or two of these having a capacity
of fifty barrels dug from a single tulip bole. In such a pitfall some
budding Washington or Lincoln may have been whelmed without causing so
much as a ripple on the surface of history.
But, turning to take leave of my stately and blooming Western beauty, I
see that she is both a blonde and a brunette. She has all the dreamy,
languid grace of the South combined with the _verve_ and force of
the North. She is dark and she is fair, with blushing cheeks and dewy
lips, sound-hearted, strong, lofty, self-reliant, a true queen of the
woods, more stately than Diana, and more vigorous than Maid Marian.
MAURICE THOMPSON.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
Daniel Webster's "Moods."
A late magazine-article treating of one of America's illustrious
dead--Daniel Webster--alluded to his well-known sombre moods, and the
gentle suasion by which his accomplished wife was enabled to shorten
their duration or dispel them entirely.
On an occasion well remembered, though the "chiel takin' notes" was but
a simple child, I myself was present when the grim, moody reticence of
the great orator converted fully twoscore ardent admirers into personal
foes.
During the summer of 1837, Mr. Webster, in pursuit of a Presidential
nomination, executed his famous tour through the Great West, at that
time embracing only the States of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois. The first infant railway of the continent being yet in
swaddling-clothes, the journey was accomplished by private conveyance,
and the bumps and bruises stoically endured in probing bottomless pits
of prairie-mud, diversified by joltings over rude log-ways and intrusive
stumps, were but a part of the cruel price paid for a glittering prize
which in the end vanished before the aspirant like fairy gold. At
stations within reach of their personal influence, local politicians
flew to the side of the brilliant statesman with the beautiful fidelity
of steel to magnet: hence he was environed by a self-appointed escort of
obsequious men, constantly changing as he progressed.
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