Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/25

2 the moose with Anans, an Indian of the St. François tribe, who had been educated at Hanover, at Dartmouth College — that venerable institution founded by an English Earl for the education of the Indians, which, according to Anans, "spoiled a great many good Indians and made very poor white men."

Years after, in Rome, I met the Earl's great-grand-daughter. Lady Louisa Legge, and as she asked me with great naïveté about this bequest I had to tell her it had been relegated to the humble prosaic education of white boys.

But perhaps it had made Anans a better companion for my father, who had a real friendship for this son of the forest. I remember the camp in the wilderness, Anans and his Indian wife and their pappoose swung in a birch-bark cradle under a spreading tree, and a little pair of moccasins which Mrs. Anans wrought with beads for my little feet when as a child I was taken to the White Mountains. Perhaps to that I owe my love of wandering, for I have never been able to keep them still since.

My father must have been a very good housekeeper, for I remember always a most hospitable table, and a larder full of succulent delicacies — venison and moose tongue, wild turkey and quail (shot with his own unerring gun), besides all the excellent provision of the domestic farm-yard, and the yearly pig-killing, which frightful, bloody scene I used to peep at surreptitiously from my nursery window. A fine series of cellars underlined our large house, dark, wandering, limitless, like the mysteries of Udolpho, and filled with binns, where vegetables kept all winter without freezing, together with the hams of the late slaughtered pig, and his bequest of wreaths of sausages. A great barrel of