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Updated: June 12, 2025
"Mother," said Betty, mournfully, "can you really talk in that fashion to fayther, when you know how the drink's been the cause of all the misery in our house, till it's driven our poor Sammul away to crouch him down on other folk's hearth-stones in foreign parts? I should have thought we might all have learnt a lesson by this time."
Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second by our handling of it, we rehearse it, I say, by our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is easy.
On the last night the miller had raised one of the old hearth-stones and had given him the hire of many years. At daybreak the lad drifted away. Now old Gabe was following him down the river and on to the dim mountain line, where the boy's figure was plain for a moment against the sky, and then was lost.
And when Chad told who had given him Jack, the master began to talk about the faraway, curious country of which the cattle-dealer had told Chad so much: where the land was level and there were no mountains at all; where on one farm might be more sheep, cattle, and slaves than Chad had seen in all his life; where the people lived in big houses of stone and brick what brick was Chad could not imagine and rode along hard, white roads in shiny covered wagons, with two "niggers" on a high seat in front and one little "nigger" behind to open gates, and were proud and very high-heeled indeed; where there were towns that had more people than a whole county in the mountains, with rock roads running through them in every direction and narrow rock paths along these roads like rows of hearth-stones for the people to walk on the land of the bluegrass the "settlemints of old Kaintuck."
Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second by our handling of it, we rehearse it, I say, by our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is easy.
Lucy Ann stayed at the window watching him, the breeze lifting her gray curls, and the sun smiling at her. She withdrew slowly into the attic, and sank down upon the floor, close by the window. She sat there and thought, and the wind still struck upon her unheeded. Was she always to be subject to the tyranny of those who had set up their hearth-stones in a more enduring form?
The dirty skillets by the fire were kept in countenance by the dirtier pots, and the ashes were drifted and strewn over the hearth-stones in a most picturesque way. "You see," said the old woman, knocking the residuum from her cob pipe, and chafing some dry leaf between her withered hands preparatory to filling it again, "you see, Mr. Hartsook, my ole man's purty well along in the world.
"And while their owners are absent from home," chimed in Tom. "And while their owners are away from home on business," added Mark, "it means something, doesn't it? We stayed pretty close about our hearth-stones, I bet you, for we didn't know how soon our own buildings might get a-going. Where were you when it happened?" "I was at home, where you were," replied Marcy.
There were crickets chirping all round the warm hearth-stones; there was the clock ticking with the peculiar beat Susan had known from her childhood, and which then and ever since she had oddly associated within the idea of a mother and child talking together, one loud tick, and quick a feeble, sharp one following. The day had been keen, and piercingly cold.
Before restoring Hamilton, it was necessary to remove that which was unseemly; also to wash out certain stains on the hearth-stones; and those things would have tried the courage of more iron-nerved men than myself.
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