square box, made by piling logs on top of one another, the spaces
between being filled with mud, while the roof was formed of loose stone
slabs. Huts of that sort are everywhere common among the isolation of
the American backwoods; and isolated indeed they were, for the
Garfields' nearest neighbours, when they first set up house, lived as
far as seven miles away, across the uncleared forest.

When Abram Garfield came to this lonely lodge in the primaeval
woodlands, he had one son and one daughter. In 1831, the year after his
removal to his new home, a second boy was born into the family, whom his
father named James Abram. Before the baby was eighteen months old, the
father died, and was buried alone, after the only possible fashion among
such solitary settlers, in a corner of the wheat field which he himself
had cleared of its stumps. A widow's life is always a hard one, but in
such a country and under such conditions it is even harder and more
lonely than elsewhere. Mrs. Garfield's eldest boy, Thomas, was only
eleven years old; and with the aid of this one ineffectual helper, she
managed herself to carry on the farm for many years. Only those who know
the hard toil of a raw American township can have any idea what that
really means. A farmer's work in America is not like a farmer's work in
England. The man who occupies the soil is there at once his own landlord
and his own labourer; and he has to contend with nature as nobody in
England has had to contend with it for the last five centuries at least.
He finds the land covered with trees, which he has first to fell and
sell as timber; then he must dig or burn out the stumps; clear the plot
of boulders and large stones; drain it, fence it, plough it, and harrow
it; build barns for the produce and sheds for the cows; in short,
_make_ his farm, instead of merely _taking_ it. This is labour
from which many strong men shrink in dismay, especially those who have
come out fresh from a civilized and fully occupied land. For a woman and