in another world, a far-off arid
land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of
these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that
you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to
your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in
their sides.

But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we
never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare.
The "drivers," so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless
admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the
narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The
piles of slabs, the mounds of sawdust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl
of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating
up the refuse--all these sights and sounds made a return to school
difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little
tame in comparison with the life of the booms.

We were much at the Greens', our second-door neighbors to the south, and
the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the
oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in
his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a
railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he
could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or
eleven, I forget which--I am perfectly certain of the number of
buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions.
Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable
number of sausages--but what would you expect of a man who could whirl a
six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once
looking at the sun or pausing for breath?

However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat
man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his
prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and
though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that
David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride
made him altogether admirable.

Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior,
and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a
successful doctor, and we talked of the days when I was his slave and
humbly carried his