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Updated: June 17, 2025
They inherit, likewise, their fancy for the rifle. Allied with the axe, which, like Talleyrand's supposititious frontiersman, they have not forgotten, it supplies them materially with sport and subsistence. Their land, where arable at all, being unproductive as a rule, wood-chopping is their most profitable branch of farming.
I heard the men return in force the other night heard the shouting, and got up and went out to hear what was the matter. I like to go to the paymaster's tent, and watch the men getting paid off. Some have furloughs, and start at once for home, sometimes amid great chaffing and blarneying. There is every day the sound of the wood-chopping axe, and the plentiful sight of negroes, crows, and mud.
They took hold of the matter by the roots, clear at the beginning. Mrs. Howth's breath fairly left her, they went into the soul of the matter in such a dangerous way. What if Joel should hear? No doubt he would report that his master was an infidel, that would be the next thing they would hear. He was in the kitchen now: he finished his wood-chopping an hour ago.
The unusual exertions of the ride and subsequent wood-chopping had really tired all of the chums, though none of them would publicly admit it. When Bluff attempted to get up in a hurry for some purpose, he found himself so stiff he could hardly move, and it was only after much grunting and three distinct efforts that he finally managed to reach his feet. Frank only smiled.
Perhaps I was much of both. But this is a digression. I did not pay any attention to women. I shunned them. I said that to be a great author and a philosophical thinker, one must not be a man of society. I never went to a wood-chopping, to an apple-peeling, to a corn-shucking, to a barn-raising, nor indeed to any of our rustic feasts.
The work of removing heavy, soggy logs, half submerged beneath the black waters of the bayou, clearing away standing trees, and breaking up and removing Red-river rafts, wearied the sailors, and left them little spirit to meet the enemy's attacks. The faint sounds of wood-chopping in the distance told too well of the additional impediments yet in store for the adventurous mariners.
For bold riding, skillful hunting, wood-chopping, hay-tossing, ploughing, it was hard to find his equal; but, in the matter of learning, he could write legibly, read well enough, spell in an independent manner, and not much more. With regard to the wolf story, which rests upon tradition only, it is not improbable, and there is no good reason to doubt it.
All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and innocent, and it is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in some of the features of such a life; in the free, frank, and stainless companionship of young men and maidens, in the mixture of manual labour and intellectual flights dish-washing and æsthetics, wood-chopping and philosophy.
Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must have been nearly perfect, there was very much that was grand about the old Greek, very much that makes us strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay benumbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his general's coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how.
And so the day is fairly started, and I am free to think, to read, to write, or to enjoy idleness, after a further chat with Punch when turning him out to graze. My wood-chopping I do either before breakfast or towards the close of the day; the latter, I think, more often than the former.
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