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

262 ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
fun. I went out to see what he had found, and there was a
very warm and thirsty cub. Dick told me to bring out a
bowl of bread and milk and his young bruin would perform.
I did so, and Master Cub skillfully ate the bread by using his
paw for a spoon, and when he had extracted all the bread he
took up the bowl and drank the milk. After dinner Dick took
his "b'ar" home to their house on Carnelian Lake. There
was a tree near it, bent just right for a perch for the cub, and
he would climb up to it the length of his chain which was
fastened to the tree, and stretch himself on the bend and go to
sleep. The way he could be enticed down was to show him a
bowl of bread and milk, when he would speedily come down
from his perch.
When the fort was built Dick and his bear were two of the
first occupants. The latter was growing fatter and older all
the time, and alas, crosser, too. He used to chase the children
in the fort out to the length of his chain. When he one day
tore Rosamond's little dress they thought it was time to do
away with Dick's "b'ar," and so he was slaughtered and his
meat was sold to the refugees in the fort — a fine, tender treat.
Our folks told us of the raw recruits, called the militia, sent
out to guard the fort, but the boys called them instead "watermelon
thieves" because of their unbounded appetite for melons
and the fact that the most they did was to rob the melon
patches of the settlers. Inside the fort or out, most of the
refugees felt that an Indian stood over them with a tomahawk
all the time and that they were constantly in danger of cruel
death; and yet Julia and Ida told of a woman who scoured her
steel knives three times a day and took all the usual care about
her things as though she were at home, while some women felt
it was a useless exertion and fairly sacrilegious to wash dish
towels that might never be used again! In an abstract office
of her own in the city of Dayton, Ohio, little Rosamond is far
away from a stockade and red men and bear cubs, and would
scarcely recognize herself as a round-faced, tiny child in the
midst of a wild frontier life; so rapidly do the years bring their
changes that I often fancy I am left dreaming alone.
It was November, and the work of our springtime had been