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They were themselves often clergymen, and were usually utterly inexperienced in wild backwoods life, in spite of their early surroundings exactly as to-day any town in the Rocky Mountains is sure to contain some half-educated men as ignorant of mountain and plains life, of Indians and wild beasts, as the veriest lout on an eastern farm.
In his time he had met men who, worn out with the constant fight of the body's materialism against the soul's idealism, had turned their backs for ever on the world and its glittering shows, and had shut themselves up as monks of "enclosed" or "silent" orders, others he had known, who, rushing away from what we call civilisation, had encamped in the backwoods of America, or high up among the Rocky Mountains, and had lived the lives of primeval savages in their strong craving to assert a greater manliness than the streets of cities would allow them to enjoy, and all were moved by the same mainspring of action, the overpowering spiritual demand within themselves which urged them to break loose from cowardly conventions and escape from Sham.
Probably they did not realise the details as I have described them; but that was the effect, all the same. It is the glorious sense of freedom that everybody feels if they have the "backwoods spirit." It cannot be properly described, but I can smell the atmosphere of it all, even though I am now sitting in an English room in an English county.
But it was getting near the end of the season, and what was more to the purpose, there ran a tradition in the settlement that the moose never came east of Five Mile Creek, a water-course some four miles back from the fence whereon the boy was sitting. Such traditions, once established in a backwoods village, acquire an authority quite superior to fact and proof against much ocular refutation.
All is simple; all is arranged for convenience and comfort, as new homes in the backwoods ever are found; and to you it may seem odd enough to live so. You may fancy how simple a lad from this region would appear as he might pass your city streets, with his long arms and loping gait; reading signs and staring at all the city wonders.
She had read much, and had brought a number of books to the backwoods settlement; so she gave her boy a pretty good education as education went in those days and certainly a much better one than was given to boys in such out-of-the-way regions.
It is not uncommon in the far backwoods for a traveler, asking for a match, to be told there is none in the house, nor even the pioneer's flint and steel. Should the embers on the hearth go out, someone must tramp to a neighbor's and fetch fire on a torch. Hence the saying: "Have you come to borry fire, that you're in sich a hurry you can't chat?"
If, as generally happened, there was no church, the groom and his friends, all armed, rode to the house of the bride's father, plenty of whisky being drunk, and the men racing recklessly along the narrow bridle-paths, for there were few roads or wheeled vehicles in the backwoods.
"The hall was filled to suffocation. Every man present had a pipe or cigar in his mouth. It was a sulphurous place, a Pandemonium, a Zoological Garden, a Pantomime, a Comedy, a Backwoods Fourth of July, and a Donnybrook Fair, all combined. Women too were there, the fiercest in the place. Orators roared, and fingers were shaken.
The ice was black and clear and vitreous on the forest pools. The clods on the ploughed field, the broken hillocks in the pasture, the ruts of the winding backwoods road, were hard as iron and rang under the travelling hoof. The silent, naked woods, moved only by the bleak wind drawing through them from the north, seemed as if life had forgotten them.
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