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He borrowed every book that could be found within a radius of seven miles of his home, and by many readings he had made himself familiar with the score of old volumes in his log-cabin home. Mrs. Sarah K. Bolton draws a pleasing picture of the farmer boy reading at night after the day's work on the farm was done.
What a clear insight the answer gave to his own ministry. One turns back to his first sermon, that evening when, with his fellow-student in Virginia, he walked across the fields to the log-cabin where, not yet in holy orders, he preached it, and where afterward he ministered with such swiftly increasing power to a handful of negro servants. "It was an utter failure," he said afterward.
The scheme came to nothing finally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and its sorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country, which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin, while a house was building for us.
His son a sturdy young man of eighteen, inured to pioneer life had ridden far and wide to give notice of the meeting, and he was confident of a good attendance. I anticipated the labors of the day with some misgivings, for I had become slavishly accustomed to the use of written sermons; but here, before a log-cabin audience, to speak from manuscript was not to be thought of.
"Thanks thanks!" said I, grasping the hunter's hand in the warmth of my gratitude. "I accept your invitation." "This way, then, stranger!" We struck into a path that led to the right; and, after riding about two miles further, arrived at the solitary home of the hunter a log-cabin surrounded by a clearing.
Shelter and food are the first wants of the settler; the log-cabin rises to supply the one; the axe, the plough, the spade, the hoe, prepare the other. The women not seldom joined in the work of felling trees and trimming logs to be used in erecting the cabins.
At last we came out upon a slight knoll, and found ourselves close beside the low charred walls of what remained of Ouilmette's log-cabin. 'T was a most gloomy and desolate spot, but quiet enough, with never the rustle of a leaf to awake the night, or startle us. "Have you got back your nerve, Monsieur?" I asked, as we paused before the dark outline, "or must I also help you to explore within?"
However, he who knows how to read with the ends of his fingers may yet find good meat in the book. An honest provincialism has escaped Mr. Stabler's weeding-hoe here and there, and we get a few glimpses, in spite of him, into log-cabin interiors when the inmates are not in their Sunday-clothes.
It is not uncommon to find upon a hillside a freshly-built log-cabin, set in the midst of a clearing, with bristling stumps all around, reminding one of the homes of new settlers on the far-away logging-streams of Northern Wisconsin or Minnesota; the resemblance is the closer, for such notches cut in the edge of the Indiana and Kentucky wilderness are often found after a row of many miles through a winding forest solitude apparently but little changed from primeval conditions.
The scalp of the Indian he had despatched the day before was tied to the cross-bar of his bridle bit, the hair dangling almost to the ground, and John was decked out in the sacred vestments of Father Pandoza, having, long before any one was stirring in camp, ransacked the log-cabin at the Mission in which the good man had lived.
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