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Updated: May 8, 2025
That afternoon Faith helped her Aunt Prissy in preparing for the quilting. Aunt Prissy was cooking a ham, and the brick oven held some of the spiced cakes that the children liked so well. Donald cracked a big dish full of hickory-nuts, while Faith rubbed the pewter plates and pitchers until they shone like silver.
There were easy-chairs, made of the hulls of hickory-nuts; hammocks, made of the inside bark of the paw-paw; wash-bowls, curiously carved from the hulls of beech-nuts; and beautiful curtains, of the leaves of the silver poplar. The floor was paved with the seeds of the wild grape, and beautifully carpeted with the lichens from the beech and maple trees.
"We breakfasted hours ago, while you lazy fellows were fast asleep," replied an old chitmunk, poking his little nose out of a hole in the ground. "Then we shall dine with you; so make haste and get something good for us," said Nimble-foot. "I have no doubt you have plenty of butter and hickory-nuts laid up in your holes." The old chitmunk told him he might come and get them, if he could.
Folks that have tried 'em say they beat the old sort all holler that you kin crack hickory-nuts if you have both upper and lower and git a fair clamp on 'em and use yore muscles."
For a full hour we sat down with a couple of stones for nut-crackers, and forgot each other and everything else in the hypnotizing occupation of cracking hickory-nuts. And we told each other that thus do grown sad men become boys again, by a woodside, of an October morning, cracking hickory-nuts, the world well lost. The undertaker was certainly right about the road.
When autumn came, there were mushrooms, and beech-nuts, butter-nuts, hickory-nuts, wild grapes, pucker-berries, not to speak of loads of elder-berries for making wine.
But he gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine and the eglantine and the blue harebell; he picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry, the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries, and fox-grapes; he brought home armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel and the wild honeysuckle; he dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint; he gnawed the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which he called "brake," which he pulled up, and found that the soft end "tasted good;" he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, though he could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was his melancholy duty to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold-thread, the tansy, and the loathsome "boneset;" and he laid in for the winter, like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts.
Other people sent bars of soap, bags of meal, packages of smoking-tobacco, and flannel petticoats. A pair of shoes was contributed, and several pairs of stockings, which latter were filled with apples and hickory-nuts by the considerate Kate. Several of the school children gave sticks of candy; and old Mrs.
I will insert a short account which Porter has since furnished me. "We started on the 16th of October, and reached the Federal lines on the 18th of November. During this time, we endured all the hardships imaginable. We traveled night and day, sleeping mostly in the woods, and subsisting on wild grapes, chestnuts, hickory-nuts, walnuts, and some few sweet potatoes.
He thought it might amuse your ladyship, and so he tamed it and sent it to me in a basket filled with moss, with some acorns, and hickory-nuts, and beech-mast for him to eat on his journey, for the little fellow has travelled a long way: he came from the beech-woods near the town of Coburg, in the Upper Province." "And where is Coburg, nurse? Is it a large city like Montreal or Quebec?"
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