ord, brings back to me the sweet
faces, the bright eyes, the merry laughter of that night and others
like it:

Oh, hap-py is th' mil-ler who
lives by him-self! As th' wheel gos round, he
gath-ers in 'is wealth, One hand on the
hop-per and the oth-er on the bag; As the
wheel goes round, he cries out, "Grab!" Oh,
ain't you a lit-tle bit a-shamed o' this, Oh,
ain't you a lit-tle bit a-sham'd o' this, Oh,
ain't you a lit-tle bit a-sham'd o' this--To
stay all night for one sweet kiss? Oh, etc.

[Transcriber's note: A Lilypond (www.lilypond.org) rendition of
this song is at the end of this e-book.]

My mother gave me all the schooling I had that winter. A year
later they built a schoolhouse, not quite a mile away, where I
found more fun than learning. After two years I shouldered my axe
and went to the river-land with the choppers every winter morning.

My father was stronger than any of them except D'ri, who could
drive his axe to the bit every blow, day after day. He had the
strength of a giant, and no man I knew tried ever to cope with him.
By the middle of May we began rolling in for the raft. As soon as
they were floating, the logs were withed together and moored in
sections. The bay became presently a quaking, redolent plain of
timber.

When we started the raft, early in June, that summer of 1810, and
worked it into the broad river with sweeps and poles, I was aboard
with D'ri and six other men, bound for the big city of which I had
heard so much. I was to visit the relatives of my mother and spend
a year in the College de St. Pierre. We had a little frame house
on a big platform, back of the middle section of the raft, with
bunks in it, where we ate and slept and told stories. Lying on the
platform, there was a large flat stone that held our fires for both
cooking and comfort. D'ri called me in the dusk of the early
morning, the first night out, and said we were near the Sault. I
got up, rubbed my eyes, and felt a mighty thrill as I heard the
roar of the great rapids and the creaking withes, and felt the lift
of the speeding water. D'ri said they had broken the raft into
three parts, ours being hindmost. The roaring grew louder, until
my shout was as a whisper in a hurricane. The logs began to heave
and fall, and waves came rushing through them. Sheets of spray
shot skyward, coming down like a shower. We were shaken as by an
earthquake in the rough water. Then the roar fe