Pen Pictures, of Eventful Scenes and Struggles of LifeCraig, B. F. (Benjamin Franklin)
History
Pen Pictures, of Eventful Scenes and Struggles of Life
Craig, B. F. (Benjamin Franklin)
United States -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction
With a few back glances at girlhood, we hasten on to her womanhood. Aunt
Fillis permitted Roxie to attend a country school a few months in each
year. The school house was built of round logs, was twenty feet square,
with one log left out on the south side for a window. The seats were
made of slabs from the drift wood on the Ohio River, (the first cut
from the log, one side flat, the other having the shape of the log,
rounding); holes were bored in the slabs and pins eighteen inches long
inserted for legs. These benches were set against the wall of the room,
and the pupils arranged sitting in rows around the room. In the center
sat the teacher by a little square table, with a switch long enough to
reach any pupil in the house without rising from his seat. And thus the
heroine of the snow storm received the rudiments of an education, as she
grew to womanhood.
Roxie was obedient, tidy--and twenty, and like all girls of her class,
had a lover. Aunt Fillis said Roxie kept everything about the house in
the right place, and was always in the right place herself; she said
more, she could not keep house without her. By what spirit Aunt Fillis
was animated we shall not undertake to say, but she forbade Roxie's
lover the prerogative of her premises.
Roxie's family blood could never submit to slavery, and she ran
away with her lover, was married according to the common law, which
recognizes man and wife as one, and the man is that one.
They went to Louisville, and the reader has already been introduced to
the womanhood of Roxie Fairfield in the person of Daymon's wife.
The reader is referred to the closing sentence of Scene First. Daymon
was granted a new trial, which never came off, and the young couple left
Louisville and went to Chicago, Illinois. Roxie had been concealed by a
female friend, and only learned the fate of Daymon a few minutes before
she entered the court room. Daymon resolved to reform, for when future
hope departed, and all but life had fled, the faithful Roxie rose like a
spirit from the dead to come and stand by him.
Daymon and Roxie left Louisville without any intimation of
their-destination to any one, without anything to pay expenses, and
nothing but their wearing apparel, both resolved to work, for the sun
shone as brightly upon them as it did upon any man and woman in the
world.
As a day laborer Daymon worked in and around the infant city, as
ignorant of the bright future as the wild ducks that hovered 'round the
shores of the lake.
It is said that P. J. Marquette, a French missionary from Canada was the
first white man that settled on the spot where Chicago now stands. This
was before the war of the Revolution, and his residence was temporary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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