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

OVER THE MOUNTAINS 57
flowers at the bottom of the narrow skirt was a brocade woven
into the material. I Hke to fancy our httle mother in those
gowns, with her dark brown hair and eyes, her clear complexion
and red cheeks. Long afterwards old Mrs. Dill was wont to
tell Sister Ida and me how much prettier was our mother than
either of her daughters. Illness and labors manifold left their
marks on the sweet complexion, but those softly shining eyes
did not lose their beauty.
As soon as she began to earn money she also began to save
it to buy her parents a home. She used as her safety deposit
bank a large, empty Mason's Blacking box, and in this she
placed her earnings until she had enough to buy a small farm
of perhaps ten or twelve acres. This little farm lot was
situated on Snow Hill of the Whitewater Hills, not far from
Harrison, Ohio, but in Indiana. She built with her careful
savings a hewn log house, but it was her ambition to replace
it with a larger frame one, and so the Mason Blacking box
began to receive coins again. When the amount of her savings
began to warrant the planning of a new and better house
her elder brother, William, asked a loan, and was given the
sum of the contents of the blacking box. Later when she
suggested the return of the amount, that she might carry out
her original intention, he only laughed and said he had never
expected to return the loan; nor did he ever do so. Our dear
mother did not dwell upon this disappointment nor allow its
injustice to embitter her.
In the course of time in some way, by her industry the
hewn logs of Grandfather Keeler's house were weatherboarded
and it was well plastered with lime inside, making a good home
for our grandparents. Even as late as 1896 it was still stand-
ing, and is to us yet a monument of our mother's filial piety.
As I recall this little house I seem to see our grandfather, that
quiet, little old man, coming out the door with a lot of splint
baskets, and our cousins. Aunt Julia Ann's children, helping
him up with his load to the back of his old bay horse, called
"Old Blaze" because of the blaze of white in his face, and the
setting out of the aged basket-maker for some near-by town
— himself, his crutches and his Wares, all on horseback. Our