dirt these better days. Frequently our only baking-powder was
white lye, made by dropping ash-cinders into wafer. Our cinders
were made by letting the sap of green timber drip into hot ashes.
Often deer's tallow, bear's grease, or raccoon's oil served for
shortening, and the leaves of the wild raspberry for tea. Our
neighbors went to mill at Canton--a journey of five days, going and
coming, with an ox-team, and beset with many difficulties. Then
one of them hollowed the top of a stump for his mortar and tied his
pestle to the bough of a tree. With a rope he drew the bough down,
which, as it sprang back, lifted the pestle that ground his grain.

But money was the rarest of all things in our neighborhood those
days. Pearlash, black-salts, West India pipe-staves, and rafts of
timber brought cash, but no other products of the early settler.
Late that fall my mother gave a dance, a rude but hearty pleasuring
that followed a long conference in which my father had a part.
They all agreed to turn to, after snowfall, on the river-land, cut
a raft of timber, and send it to Montreal in the spring. Our
things had come, including D'ri's fiddle, so that we had chairs and
bedsteads and other accessories of life not common among our
neighbors. My mother had a few jewels and some fine old furniture
that her father had given her,--really beautiful things, I have
since come to know,--and she showed them to those simple folk with
a mighty pride in her eyes.

Business over, D'ri took down his fiddle, that hung on the wall,
and made the strings roar as he tuned them. Then he threw his long
right leg over the other, and, as be drew the bow, his big foot
began to pat the floor a good pace away. His chin lifted, his
fingers flew, his bow quickened, the notes seemed to whirl and