I have spoken of the freshets which sometimes inundated our island; but these were never very serious. They fertilized it with the loam they brought down from richer lands above, and they strewed its low shores with stranded drift. But there were so many dams on the river that no freshet could gather furious head upon it; at the worst, it could back up upon us the slack water from the mill-dam below us. Once this took place in such degree that our wheels stood still in their flooded tubs. This was a truly tremendous time. The event appears in the retrospect to have covered many days; I dare say it covered a half-day at most. Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passes in that latitude without making ice enough for that sport, and there could not have been much sledding either. We read, enviously enough, in Peter Parley’s _First Book of History_, of the coasting on Boston Common, and we made some weak-kneed sleds (whose imbecile runners flattened hopelessly under them) when the light snows began to come; but we never had any real coasting, as our elders never had any real sleighing in the jumpers they made by splitting a hickory sapling for runners, and mounting any sort of rude box upon them. They might often have used sleighs in the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads, and lasted all winter. There were not many boys in our neighborhood, and we brothers had to make the most of one another’s company. For a little while in the winter some of us went two miles away through the woods to school; but there was not much to be taught a reading family like ours in that log-hut, and I suppose it was not thought worth while to keep us at it. No impression of it remains to me, except the wild, lonesome cooing of the turtle-doves when they began to nest in the neighboring oaks. IX We had a poor fellow, named B----, for our saw-miller, whose sad fortunes are vividly associated with the loveliness of the early summer in my mind. He was a hapless, harmless, kindly creature, and he had passed most of his manhood in a sort of peonage to a rich neighboring farmer whom he was hopelessly in debt to, so that I suppose it was like the gift of freedom to him when he came into our employ; but his happiness did not last long. Within a month or two he was seized with a flux that carried him off after a few days, and then began to attack his family. He had half a dozen children, and they all died, except one boy, who was left with his foolish, simple mother. My oldest brother had helped nurse them, and had watched with them, and seen them die; and it fell to me to go to the next village one morning and buy linen to make the last two of their shrouds. I mounted the italic-footed mare, barebacked, as usual, with my legs going to sleep on either side of her, but my brain wildly awake, and set out through the beautiful morning, turned lurid and ghastly by the errand on which I was bent.