Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 24.djvu/614

606 Polly's fire beneath the open chimney which stood beside my cabin. The bread had risen in the night. The wa- ter soon boiled above the logs. The children came, laughing, out upon the grass, barefoot, and fearless of the dew. Then Polly appeared with her gridiron and bear-steak, or with her griddle and eggs, and, in fewer min- utes than this page has cost me, the breakfast was ready for Alice to carry, dish by dish, to the white-clad table on the piazza. Not Raphael and Adam more enjoyed their watermelons, fox- grapes, and late blueberries ! And, in the long croon of the breakfast, linger- ing at the board, we revenged ourselves for the haste with which it had been prepared.

When we were well at table, a horn from the cabins below sounded the re- veille for the drowsier workmen. Soon above the larches rose the blue of their smokes ; and when we were at last nodding to the children, to say that they might leave the table, and Polly was folding her napkin as *to say she wished we were gone, we would see tall Asaph Langdon, then foreman of the carpenters, sauntering up the val- ley with a roll of paper, or an adze, or a shingle with some calculations on it, with something on which he wanted Mr. Orcutt's directions for the day.

An hour of nothings set the carnal machinery of the day agoing. We fed the horses, the cows, the pigs, and the hens. We collected the eggs and cleaned the hen-houses and the barns. We brought in wood enough for the day's fire, and water enough for the day's cooking and cleanliness. These heads describe what I and the children did. Polly's life during that hour was more mysterious. That great first hour of the day is devoted with women to the deepest arcana of the Eleusinian mysteries of the divine science of house- keeping. She who can meet the requi- sitions of that hour wisely and bravely conquers in the Day's Battle. But what she does in it, let no man try to say! It can be named, but not de- scribed, in the comprehensive formula, "Just stepping round."

That hour well given to chores and to digestion, the children went to Mr. Orcutt's open-air school, and I to my rustic study, a separate cabin, with a rough square table in it, and some book- boxes equally rude. No man entered it, excepting George and me. Here for two hours I worked undisturbed, how happy the world, had it neither post- man nor door-bell ! worked upon my Traces of Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, and then was ready to render such service to the cause and to George as the day might demand. Thus I rode to Lincoln or to Foxcroft to order supplies ; I took my gun and lay in wait on Chairback for a bear ; I transferred to the hewn lum- ber the angles or bevels from the care- ful drawings : as best I could, I filled an apostle's part, and became all things to all these men around me. Happy those days ! and thus the dam was built ; in such Arcadian simplicity was reared the mighty wheel ; thus grew on each side the towers which were to sup- port the flies ; and thus, to our delight not unmixed with wonder, at last we saw those mighty flies begin to turn. Not in one day, nor in ten ; but in a year or two of happy life, full of the joy of joys, the "joy of eventful liv- ing!"

Yet, for all this, $152,000 was not $197,000, far less was it $250,000; and but for Jeff. Davis and his crew the BRICK MOON would not have been born.

But at last Jeff. Davis was ready. " My preparations being completed," wrote General Beauregard, " I opened fire on Fort Sumter." Little did he know it, but in that explosion the BRICK MOON also was lifted into the sky!

Little did we know it, when, four weeks after, George came up from the settlements, all excited with the news ! The wheels had been turning now for four days, faster of course and faster. George had gone down for money to pay