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

VOICES FROM THE PAST 333
Letters" and the 7iom de plume is of evident origin. The letter
is as follows:
My Dear Editor: My new stick tluit you admired and I had
not time to tell you about is one I lately cut on the old place that my
grandfather bought in 1804, and where my father and I were horn.
Along our south line the "Big Run" cut off two or three acres, too
broken and hard to reach to be worth tilling; here a few fine oaks
used to stand when I was a child, and after they were cut away the
finest grove of locusts came up in their place. When I cut my stick
1 foimd these all dead or dying. Fine post trees were lying on the
ground and slowly rotting away, and the place of the locusts was
taken by a fine growth of sugar maples. I cut one of these and a
friend has handsomely finished it for me.
I hoped to carry this and to feel myself nearer to the home of my
childhood, but I cannot. To me it is much the same as any other
stick; and that old home — though its acres, its hills and hollows are
all there, it is gone; it is not. On the very spot of my birth I am a
stranger in a strange land. It is not that those whom I knew in my
youth are gone or changed — for that I had been prepared. But the
barn had strangely shrunk. Once it was a large building, and its
upper beam was a dizzy height to which it was a bold thing to climb,
and from which to jump down on the hay had in it a spice of danger,
just enough for good fun. Now it is a very small barn and rather
low; and how grandfather could be satisfied with that north mow,
so narrow that a good load of sheaves will go far towards filling it, I
cannot see.
The apple tree across the road, where my grandfather's house
stood, is the only one left of the old orchard, all of whose trees bore
proper names — the Big Sour, the Cave, the Eggtop, the Goggin, and
such home-made appellations, the very tradition of which is now
lost; for it has been forgotten that there ever was an orchard there,
and they now call it the well-field. This apple tree — no doubt it
had a name, but I have forgotten it — is much smaller now than when
I was a little boy at my grandmother's knee, learning from her and
the pictures in the book the story of my country, and to hate the
British; and how one cold winter day, she heard the thunder of the
battle of Princeton, and her mother cried all day, but she was too
young to fear for her father, who was in the fight. The good old
lady had no doubts nor waverings, but denounced the British and
their works, which were evil, and that continually, while our men
were always right. With such nurture it is no wonder that I struck
deep roots into my native soil, and that the sudden sight of the Stars
and Stripes thrills me more than I can tell. That old apple tree, last