Page:Letters of Life.djvu/112

100. There, majestic forest trees spread a broad canopy, and younger ones interlaced their boughs, melodious with the nesting people, their feet laved by a busy, whispering burnie, as clear as crystal. Every autumn the master designated, with his usual judgment, a sufficient quantity of wood for our yearly expenditure, which, after being cut in proper lengths, was stored to dry in a basement room with glass windows, which might have been easily fitted up for a kitchen, had the size of the family required it. Those piles were pleasant objects, from their mathematical symmetry as well as the vision of the cheerful warmth their glowing coals and dancing flame would diffuse around the wintry hearth-stone. How much more poetical than the black stove and the coal-fed furnace!

The man who depended on the regular commission of transporting these loads of wood in his team, was an old Revolutionary soldier. He had been in the battle of Bunker Hill, and maintained his post at that sanguinary spot called the "Rail-fence," whence so few escaped. Weather-beaten and wiry was he, like one who had seen and could bear hardships. No skill had he in narration. His taste was for deeds. He would not have been apt to waste powder in a poor aim, and might be a tight hand at the bayonet.

"I fired seventeen times," said he, "till my cartridges giv' out; and I guess some on 'em told, for I looked out sharp afore I spent my ammunition."