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Orderly, resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of "push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them both and respected my mother for defending them. To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the McClintocks did not appear particularly heinous.
After breakfast and while the McClintocks were being loaded Bennett sent Ferriss on ahead to choose a road through and over the ridges. It was dreadful work. For two hours Ferriss wandered about amid the broken ice all but hopelessly bewildered.
Long drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing to all the world that the McClintocks were ready for the day's race. Answers came back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures of laggard hands could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the last team came clattering in and was hooked into its place, David called "All right!" and the cylinder began to hum.
Draw a cheer. Sit ye down." A clamor of welcome fills the place. Harriet and I are put to warm before the blaze. Grandad takes Frank upon his knee and the cutting wind of the gray outside world is forgotten. This house in which the McClintocks were living at this time, belonged to a rented farm.
At last one of them patted my brother on the head and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work good!" and we were very proud of the old man's praise. The McClintocks The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental pictures of them till after my father's homecoming in '65.
Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.
The contrast between the McClintocks, my hunter uncles, and Addison Garland, my father's brother who came to visit us at about this time was strikingly significant even to me. Tall, thoughtful, humorous and of frail and bloodless body, "A. Garland" as he signed himself, was of the Yankee merchant type.
If it is difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with which the chronicle was set down.
It is a curious fact that nearly all of the ballads which the McClintocks and other of these powerful young sons of the border loved to sing were sad. Nellie Wildwood, Minnie Minturn, Belle Mahone, Lily Dale were all concerned with dead or dying maidens or with mocking birds still singing o'er their graves. Weeping willows and funeral urns ornamented the cover of each mournful ballad.
The fragrance of the soup thoroughly awakened even little Frank, and when we drew around the table, each face shone with the light of peace and plenty, and all our elders tried to forget that this was the last Thanksgiving festival which the McClintocks and Garlands would be able to enjoy in the old valley. How good those oysters were!
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