the
pork, which early began to prevail in his diet, was hardly a wholesome
one. Besides, in cutting down the trees, he opened spaces to the sun
which had been harmless enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now
sent up their ague-breeding miasms. Ague was the scourge of the whole
region, and it was hard to know whether the pestilence was worse on the
rich levels beside the rivers, or on the stony hills where the settlers
sometimes built to escape it. Fevers of several kinds prevailed, and
consumption was common in the climates that ague spared. There was
little knowledge of the rules of health, and little medical skill for
those who lost it; most of the remedies for disease and accident were
such only as home nursing and home treatment could supply.

When once the settler was housed against the weather, he had the
conditions of a certain rude comfort indoors. If his cabin was not proof
against the wind and rain or snow, its vast fireplace formed the means
of heating, while the forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At
first he dressed in the skins and pelts of the deer and fox and wolf,
and his costume could have varied little from that of the red savage
about him, for we often read how' he mistook Indians for white men at
first sight, and how the Indians in their turn mistook white men for
their own people. The whole family went barefoot in the summer, but in
winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin, and buckskin leggins or
trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed
where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and
flax called linsey-woolsey, and out of this the dresses of his wife and
daughters were made; the wool was shorn from the sheep, which were
so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the
wolves, which were very fond of mutton, but had no use for wool. For a
wedding dress a cotton check was thought superb, and it really cost a
dollar a yard; silks, satins, laces, were unknown. A man never left his
house without his rifle; the gun was a part of his dress, and in his
belt he carried a hunting knife and a hatchet; on his head he wore a cap
of squirrel skin, often with the plumelike tail dangling from it.

The furniture of the cabins was, like the clothing of the pioneers,
homemade. A bedstead was contrived by stretching poles from forked
sticks driven into the ground, and laying clapboards across them; the
bedclothes were bears