huts, chopping, piling, ploughing, planting, and hoeing. The ladies also
have their particular frolics, such as wool-picking, or cutting out and
making the home-spun woollen clothes for winter. The entertainment given
on such occasions is such as the house people can afford; for the men,
roast mutton, pot pie, pumpkin pie, and rum dough nuts; for the ladies,
tea, some scandal, and plenty of "_sweet cake_," with stewed apple and
custards. There are, at certain seasons, a great many of these frolics,
and the people never grow tired of attending them, knowing that the logs
on their own fallows will disappear all the quicker for it. The house
being now on the runners, thirty yoke of oxen, four abreast, were
fastened to an enormous tongue, or pole, made of an entire tree of ash.
No one can form any idea, until they have heard it, of the noise made in
driving oxen; and, in such an instance as this, of the skill and tact
required in starting them, so that they are all made to pull at once. I
have often seen the drivers, who are constantly shouting, completely
hoarse; and after a day's work so exhausted that they have been unable
to raise the voice. Although the cattle are very docile, and understand
well what is said to them, yet from the number of turnings and twistings
they require to be continually reminded of their duty. Amid, then, all
the noise and bustle made by intimating to such a number whether they
were to "haw" or "gee," the shoutings of the younger parties assembled,
the straining of chains and the creaking of boards, the ponderous pile
was set in motion along the smooth white and marble-like snow road,
whose breadth it entirely filled up. It was a sight one cannot well
forget--to see it move slowly up the hill, as if unwilling to leave the
spot it had been raised on, notwithstanding the merry shouts around, and
the flag they had decked it with streaming so gaily through the green
trees as they bent over it till it reached the site destined for it,
where it looked as much at home as if it were too grave and steady a
thing to take the step it had done. This was in March--we had been