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These backwoodsmen greatly resembled one another; their leaders were but types of the rank and file, and did not differ so very widely from them; yet two men stand out clearly from their fellows. Above the throng of wood-choppers, game-hunters, and Indian fighters loom the sinewy figures of Daniel Boon and George Rogers Clark.
As for the ax, that is lost, somehow, and although I have made diligent inquiry, I have never been able to find where it is. Some people think the fairy took it after King Ranier died, and hid it again in a tree; and I recommend all wood-choppers to look at the heart of every tree they fell, for this wonderful ax.
'Bean porridge hot, Bean porridge cold, Bean porridge best Nine days old. The wood-choppers in winter used to freeze it into cakes and carry it into the woods. Many a time I have made a good dinner on a chunk of frozen porridge." The Pensioner remembered what took place in his early years, but he lost his reckoning many times a day upon what was going on in the town.
But since I left those shores the wood-choppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
He had, strangely enough, forgotten to make a calculation of what each log would cost him to cut and haul two miles. There were the wood-choppers at a dollar a day, the teamsters at seventy-five cents a day, and four pairs of oxen to each log to feed. Eight logs a day he was told that each team would haul, and he believed it.
A tree four feet in diameter is called undersized in these woods; and so skillful are the wood-choppers that they can make the largest giant of the forest fall just where they want it, or, as they say, they "drive a stake with the tree." To chop down a redwood-tree, the chopper does not stand on the ground, but upon a stage sometimes twelve feet above the ground.
It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were full of the same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less severely tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the trees, but they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a sentinel declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the river in a canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to arms against a firefly.
The Maine men make the best wood-choppers, but the logging camp is a favorite place also for sailors; and I was told that Germans are liked as workmen about timber. The choppers grind their axes once a week usually, I was told, on Sunday and all hands in a logging camp work twelve hours a day.
I did not know at that time that I was quite immune from the poison of the oak and that the California rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal as John Muir has since assured us that he is. The last time that I passed Silverado, it was accessible only by the aid of a gang of wood-choppers.
And now they heard the bark of a dog, and a man's voice ordering him to stop his noise. "Keep still, Tige!" said the voice. "What's the use of making such a racket? I can't hear myself think. I say stop your noise! shut up!" "It is Tom Gladding, whom Perkins hired to make the clearing, one of the best wood-choppers in the country. It is wonderful with what dexterity he wields an axe."
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