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After dinner Amos took a roll of the copies of the call and rode away to the north, and Jennings hitched up his team and drove away to the south. Milton and Bradley went back to their corn-husking, feeling that they were "small petaters." "They don't intend to let us into it, that's dead sure," said Milton. "All the same, I know the scheme.
And who is freer to be a citizen than he: freer to take his part in town meeting and serve his state in some one of the innumerable small offices which form the solid blocks of organization beneath our commonwealth. I thought last fall that corn-husking came as near being monotonous work, as any I had ever done in the country.
Gambling at cards was more common among the people than suited either the priests or the civil authorities, as the records often attest. Less objectionable amusements were afforded by the corvees recreatives or gatherings at a habitant's home for some combination of work and play. The corn-husking corvee, for reasons which do not need elucidation, was of course the most popular of these.
The host at length said, "Well, I guess we'll be along" and the matter was arranged. All these gatherings are under the denomination of "frolics" such as "corn-husking frolic," "apple-cutting frolic," "quilting frolic," &c. Being somewhat curious in respect to national amusements, I attended a "corn-husking frolic" in the neighbourhood of Cincinnati.
"Oh," said I, "what a pro-slavery idea that is! where did you learn it?" "I learned it," said she, "at our corn-husking, when the Squire read extracts from John Quincy Adams's speech about China, in which he said that if China would not open her trade to the world, it would be right to make war upon her. Now war is wrong, but circumstances sometimes make it right.
Speaking of births, it is the time of "corn-planting," "corn-husking," "Christmas," "New Year," "Easter," "the Fourth of July," or some similar indefinite date. My own time of birth was no more exact; so that to this day I am uncertain how old I am. About the time of the conversation last narrated, Jefferson Dorsey, a planter near by, had a butchering.
By the middle of the month the weather became dry and warm, and the mountains were almost hidden in an Indian summer haze. "Now for the corn-husking," I said, "and the planting of the ground in raspberries, and then we shall be through with our chief labors for the year."
Captain Mathews, as an electioneering measure, invited all his neighbors, far and near, to a very magnificent corn-husking frolic. There was to be a great treat on the occasion, and "all the world," as the French say, were eager to be there. Crockett and his family were of course among the invited guests.
The crowd then melted away in groups to spend the rest of the day in games or dancing or in friendly visits of one family with another. Especially popular among the young people of each parish were the corvées récréatives, or "bees" as we call them nowadays in our rural communities. There were the épuchlette or corn-husking, the brayage or flax-beating, and others of the same sort.
Primitive athletic games and commonplace talk, enlivened by frontier jests and stories, formed the sum of social intercourse when half a dozen or a score of settlers of various ages came together at a house-raising or corn-husking, or when mere chance brought them at the same time to the post-office or the country store.
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