, no mill short of forty
miles, and no schools worth the name. Sunday was a day set apart for
hunting, fishing, horse-racing, card-playing, balls, dances, and all
kinds of jollity and mirth. We killed our meat out in the woods, wild,
and beat our meal and hominy with a pestle and mortar. We stretched a
deer-skin over a hoop, burned holes in it with the prongs of a fork,
sifted our meal, baked our bread, eat it, and it was first-rate eating,
too. We raised, or gathered out of the woods, our own tea. We had sage,
bohea, cross-vine, spice, and sassafras teas in abundance. As for
coffee, I am not sure that I ever smelled it for ten years. We made our
sugar out of the water of the maple-tree, and our molasses, too. These
were great luxuries in those days. We raised our own cotton and flax. We
water-rotted our flax, broke it by hand, scutched it, picked the seed
out of the cotton with our fingers; our mothers and sisters carded,
spun, and wove it into cloth, and they cut and made our garments and
bed-clothes, etc. And when we got on a new suit thus manufactured, and
sallied out into company, we thought ourselves as _big as any body_."

Young Peter grew up in this rough country with a constitution of iron,
and a fair share of Western courage, independence, and energy. He was
sent by his father to a neighboring school, but the teacher was an
indifferent one, and he learned merely to read and write and cipher
imperfectly.

He was a "wild, wicked boy," he tells us, and grew up to delight in
horse-racing, card-playing, and dancing. His father seems to have
enjoyed having so dashing a son, but his mother, who was a pious woman,
took his course seriously to heart, and wept and prayed over her boy as
only a Christian mother can. She often talked to him, and moved him so
deeply that he frequently vowed to lead a better life; but his pleasures
were too tempting, and he fell back again into his old habits. His
father presented him with a race-horse and a pack of cards, and he
became known among his youthful companions as one of the most fearless
riders and the luckiest fellow at cards in the county. The good mother
wept and prayed all the more, and the boy hid his cards from her to keep
her from burning them.

In 1801, when he was sixteen years old, a change came over him. He had
been out with his father and brother to attend a wedding in the
neighborhood. The affair was conducted with all the uproarious merriment
incident to those d