Elm Hill Farm, cont.

Father told me that when he was a little boy he loved to come down the ladder, - not the stairs, note - in the early morning from his bed in the loft of the log house to get into bed with his mother.  The fire in the great fireplace was always burning, so the room was at least dimly lighted.  One morning after a night of severe storm, he started down the ladder, and to his horror he saw a great big Indian stretched out on the floor in front of the fire.  The little boy scurried back to his own bed and pulled the covers over his head.  Later in the morning when he looked fearfully down, the Indian had gone.  

That loft in which the children, at least some of them, slept must have been well ventilated in spite of the fact that many people used to think the night air harmful.  In my youth when things were not so we would have them, and there was more or less grumbling, it was common to hear said, “Well, you ought to have seen how it was when I was a boy!  Why when we woke up in the morning in winter, often the snow would be drifted in on the bedclothes!”  Or remarks similar to fit the occasion.

At “Teed’s Corner,” a little way up the road, there stood Teed’s Tavern, a great big rambling house that I dimly remember.  In such a storm as drove the Indian into Grandfather’s cabin, Indians came into the bedroom of the Tavern-keeper, and stretched themselves on the floor.  Hearing a noise in the night, Mr. Teed started to get out of bed to find out what was going on.  He put his foot on a Indian lying on the floor beside his bed.  The Indian’s grunt told him what was “the noise.” He was not at all disturbed.  They all slept peacefully until morning.

I wonder how the women liked these invasions.  They had to get used to it of course.

When Father was born he got some kind of eye infection from the mid-wife or nurse who took care of him.  It gave him a good bit of trouble in his little boyhood.  One day a neighbor found him trudging down the road toward Moscow and asked him where he was going.  “I’m going to Moscow to buy me some new eyes” was the reply.  He outgrew the trouble and his blue eyes were one of his best features. 

One day he started out with a pail to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

As time passed the first pressure of things to be done passed too, and Thomas Dodge built his frame house on the knoll beside the barns.

Can’t you think what a pleasure it must have been to move from the log house to the frame house?  The log house must have cramped so large a family and made many unnecessary steps to do the chores.  Did the new house seem large and wonderful?  It really wasn’t.  It has grown to be a large house in the hundred years since it was built and from the first it was of good New England type. 

Why, oh why, didn’t we find definitely the year the family moved? Fred, the oldest member of the next generation said it was 1834.  Anyway it was about that time.