Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

OUR NEIGHBORS 137
life in their youth. These boys and girls grew rapidly to
maturity and then fell victims to the terrible disease, consumption;
and that prosperous home of our neighbors assumed
the appearance of a hospital. One of the older daughters
married a man by the name of Orcutt, and he too died of the
dread disease; then her two boys were taken in the same way.
So this family, which seemed so well equipped for the battle
of life, succumbed early; Sarah, Julia, Isaac — their names
are all written on the stone. Jane, the youngest, was near
my age, and was living when last I heard — the only one when
we met after we were sixty. I remember her as a girl, handsome
and bright, very popular in school, an expert in fine
needlework. What lovely embroidery she used to do! In fact,
the family did well everything they undertook.
It did seem strange that, with strong parents who gave no
indications of anything like consumption and had no traditions
pointing to any hereditary taint in their generations, the dis-
ease should have appeared. Of course we now attribute its
devastations to contagion, and that would account for the
family taking it one by one; though the father and mother
lived and filled the allotted measure of threescore years and
ten. When we were there ten years ago the old Bruin home
was still standing and in good repair, but my friend Jane was
the only survivor. There were many tragedies in this family,
of which I will not write; they only prove that what may seem
to a passer-by but a commonplace existence may know the
most dramatic of situations. Time has lent a blissful forget-
fulness to all the sorrows of their life. The stranger from a
foreign land plows their fields and eats the fruit and gathers
the harvest to fill the great barn which through our childhood
was a marvel of magnitude. Their old gobbler that chased
Brother Joe because he wore a red scarf is probably remembered
only by me as I write of these kind old neighbors of ours.
The Bruin homestead, like many another, had its history
written in part in its architecture. There stood the first log
house, a large hewn-log dwelling, well pointed up with mortar;
there were born their earliest brood, and there also some of
them died. In that old home the busy mother cooked before