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

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
weave shop, the cellar house, the picket fence about the old
garden (even the nails for which he had made himself), then
the orchards he and our father planted,— where are they now?
Searching for some familiar landmark, we go down to the
spring, which in the long ago we called Deer Lick Spring.
We found it full of silt — naught but dampness there, no flow
of sweet, pure water. The sugar camp is now but a few scattered
maple trees, only serving to mark the site of the grove
where we children made sugar. The orchard south of our
house, where in springtime hundreds of song birds congregated,
is gone. Redbird and bluebird, orioles, wild canaries, sugar
birds and meadow-larks with the mocking bird, once filled
the fragrant air with dehghtful music; but they, too, are gone
from what were leafy haunts of old. Even the dear old walnut
tree, after surviving the storms of one hundred years, has
lately lost its fine symmetrical top.
Looking further, I noticed near the walnut tree quite a
pretty maple, and distinctly recalled the day our father planted
the young sapling from which it had grown, though that was
more than half a century ago. There it stood, a silent witness
to attest to the fact that he had lived. Glad am I that he
survives in a memory greener than the maple, and is remembered
to the third generation of his descendants. His example
lives in those who follow him with true and honest lives; he is
not without witnesses of his own kind.
Our elder brother has left a record of a visit to the old farm.
It is pasted in a time-worn scrapbook whose back is gone and
whose pages are falhng apart. I cannot bear that it should
perish, for the letter is so like him and brings back so clearly
the boy I used to know in the home of our childhood that I am
copying it here — a voice from our past. Before some unknowing
hand consigns the old book to the flames or rubbish
pile, I want Brother William's words to live again on these
pages of our annals. I think these well-written words are true
glimpses of his boyhood, and must be prized as such by his
children and grandchildren, and will be also by coming generations
of his blood. It comes under the head of "Benson's