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The land around our village which remained unbroken, was covered with blue-grass which furnished excellent pasture for our horses. Several fine springs poured out of the bluff near by, from which we were well supplied with good water.
My duty at this new home was to attend to the horses, to bring the cows from the pasture, sweep the yard, wait on the table, nurse two children, etc. I stayed at this place for two and one-half years, and as my knowledge of things increased my duties became more and more exacting. During this whole time, and for two years before, I had not seen or heard from my mother.
Sitting thus in the dusk of the evening, and looking out over the green pasture to where the nigher hills ceased and the distant seemed to come immediately after, their distance only indicated by color, though the whole Ohio "bottom" was between, she forgot the Mephistopheles who sat not far away, and dreamed of August, the "grand," as she fancifully called him.
They are like a little mountain clan all Baridons, or Michels, or Orcieres, or Bertholons, or Arnouds proud of their descent from the ancient Vaudois. It is their boast that a Roman Catholic does not live among them. Once, when a young shepherd came up from the valley to pasture his flock in the mountains, he fell in love with a maiden of the village, and proposed to marry her.
You could not call the place a village, nor yet could it be called a town. Viewed from the bluff, on the English side of the river, it was a long stretch of small farmhouses some painted red, with green shutters, some painted white, with red shutters set upon long strips of land, green, yellow, and brown, as it chanced to be pasture land, fields of grain, or "plough-land."
Upon the hill along the edges of the pasture where the woods cast a luminous shadow she found a comfortable seat in the sun-dried grasses, and here she curled up, examining the knitting in her hands, eyes lifted every moment to steal a glance around the sunlit solitude.
Below it, on the one hand, the ancient colonial houses are scattered down the shore among green lawns like pasture lands, and beside grass-grown streets with a trail of dust in the middle of them. On the other hand, the Siwash Indian lodges are clustered all along the beach.
May 29. brite and fair. i have to go to pasture 2 times every day. i like to go in the woods but i dont like to have to go. today i found a nest in the barn with 15 hens egs. i gess mother wont say mutch about my hens now. May 30. Rany. Beany has gone to Bideford to see Tom Cleves. i hope Tom will come with him when Beany comes home. i went up to Whacker Chadwicks tonite.
I'm going away off in the pasture to-morrow and practise that bray all by myself till I can do it to perfection. Then when A.O. begins to sing his praises again, I won't say a word. I'll just give her Jimmy's laugh. Won't she be astonished? She's bound to recognize it, for it's the only one of its kind in the world. I shall keep her guessing until after Christmas, where I heard it."
"By bein' wise to farmin'. Why, the whole blame family works. They ain't ashamed to roll up their sleeves an' dig sons an' daughters an' daughter-in-laws, old man, old woman, an' the babies. They have a sayin' that a kid four years old that can't pasture one cow on the county road an' keep it fat ain't worth his salt.
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