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Updated: May 27, 2025
He had been thinking about that book all afternoon. The next morning Sarah shooed everyone out of the cabin. Abe was down by the horse trough, mixing the whitewash in a big tub. By the time he returned, she had a bucket of hot water and a gourdful of soft soap ready. After washing the inside of the cabin he got busy with the whitewash. First he did the walls.
Her eye lighting on a gourdful of water on the puncheon table, she tore a strip from her dress and washed and bound me deftly. The bullet was in the flesh, and gave me no great pain. "Lie there, ye imp!" she commanded, when she had finished. "Some one's under the bed," said I, for I had heard a movement.
There were no swamps. I was on the bed in the cabin looking at the shifts and hunting shirts on the pegs, and Polly Ann would bring a gourdful of clear water from the spring as far as the door. Nay, once I got it to my lips, and it was gone. Sometimes a young man in a hunting shirt, square-shouldered, clear-eyed, his face tanned and his fair hair bleached by the sun, would bring the water.
All that day Robert went barelegged, and splashed water, wading out far to dip up a gourdful; and he thought it was fun to help stretch the clothes-line among saplings, and lift the scalded linen on a paddle into the tub, losing himself in the stream. Ordinary washdays as he remembered them, were rather disagreeable. Everybody had to wake early, and a great deal of fine-split wood was needed.
"The first thing in the morning I used ter go by the friendly, old well and drink a gourdful of the soft, cool water, then feed Tom and Jerry and bring in an armload of wood. As I came in the door the frosty air was sweet with the smell of home-cured bacon which the old woman was fixing fer breakfast and when I sat down there it was jest right, a streak of lean and of fat showing in thin layers.
She suddenly stopped knitting, and bent her eyes eagerly on an opening in the woods on a hill-top whence the road wound down to the house. The Deacon's eyes followed hers, and he saw unmistakable signs of men in butternut clothes. The woman saw that he noticed them, and her manner changed. "Come inside the house," she said pleasantly, "and I'll git you a gourdful of water fresh from the spring."
Then he came to a pool of water and he called to it to get out of the way or he would drink it up and as it did not move, he drank it dry. Then he came to a post and said "Get out of my way or I will jump over you" "I ate a gourdful of mice And by the side of the ant-hill I ate the crow Hurrah!"
This lady, on being called in, would brew up a large caldron of medicinal roots and barks and sprouts and things; and then she would deluge the interior of the sufferer with a large gourdful of this pleasing mixture at regular intervals. It was efficacious, too. The inundated person either got well or else he drowned from the inside.
Sure enough, the old cow was in the stable, and she gave Jim Leonard a snort of welcome and then lowed anxiously. He fumbled through the dark to her side, and began to milk her. She had been milked only a few hours before, and so he got only a gourdful from her. But it was all strippings, and rich as cream, and it was smoking warm.
Being able to cross the waterless districts by a couple of long marches, they content themselves for the time with a small gourdful, and with keeping their imaginations dwelling upon the copious quantities they will drink upon arrival at the watering-place. The march through this waterless district was most monotonous, and a dangerous fever attacked me, which seemed to eat into my very vitals.
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