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

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
of all that my grandfather planted, is still alive and green, though
shorn of its spreading boughs.
That the plowshare had passed over the ground where the house
in which my father was born had stood, and that the meadow grass
grows thick and high there, did not surprise me. Searching among
the roots of the grass I found pieces of grandmother's china, and I
seemed to remember the very plates and bowls.
Twice before, in late years, I had visited the ground and could not
be satisfied; it would come right, and after a year or two the longing
to see it and reconcile its present state with what I then thought it
drove me to it again. This time cured me. I do not care to see it
again, for it can never be reconciled. The change is in me as well as
in it. I now see the farm as it is; then I did not understand it.
For another reason, too, the haunts of my childhood are gone forever.
I have woven them into the warp and woof of all my fancies. The
Swedish wolves have chased me through our woods; just below them
in Raymond's field the Niger flows, for I have often seen elephants
feeding on an island there. Just below the spring, under a sugar
tree by the run, was the spot where Paulding fell into a doze and
overheard that wonderful debate of the animals, while a tall hickory
which crowned the top of a neighboring knoll was where the eagle
"composedly made a meal of both hawk and dove." Not twenty
feet away is a scene in Synnove Golbakken, that wonderful story of
Norwegian life, pure and sweet as the air of their pine-clad hills; there
I stood and watched the eagle soaring and circling above the tallest
tree, and picking it out for a nest. 'Tis but a few rods to the scene
of one of the choice incidents of Reineke Fuchs; and the aged athlete
Milo met his wretched death, devoured by wolves, held fast by his
fingers in an oaken rail that lay along the back fence near the leaning
tree.
Cummings' oak, bent, no doubt, by a storm into an arch, was a
fairy castle to me, and under it the "Butterflies' Ball" and the
"Grasshoppers' Feast" were held. The place where Jacob slept on
his stone pillow at Luz was the open field; the groves which the good
Josiah cut down were a fine growth of young locusts near by. Satyrs,
hinds, and gazelles and the Wilderness of Kadesh were in the lower
field, the sheep pasture of my earliest memories, and where we afterward
raised the great wheat crop. The back orchard was the wilderness
of Jericho, and a little beyond flowed the Jordan, not, however,
through "stormy banks," but peacefully, like the Stillwater, and
about as broad. Beyond Jordan, near where the dry elm stood which
burned all one autumn night and in the morning lay a fallen giant
on the ground, was an elder bush, under which the bondwoman,
flying from the jealousy of her mistress and lost in the wilderness
of Beersheba, dying with thirst, threw her child "and sat her down a
good way off, as it were a bowshot," that she might not see him die.