Though stunned by this appalling calamity, Eliza Ballou Garfield, true to the heroic ancestry from which she sprung, took up the burden of life with invincible courage. The prospect was a hard one. Of the four children, the oldest, Thomas, was ten years of age; the two little girls ranged at seven and four, and the blue-eyed baby, James, had seen only twenty months. On the other hand, the widow’s resources were scanty indeed. The little farm was only begun. To make a farm in a timber country is a life task for the stoutest man. Years and years of arduous toil would be required to fell the timber, burn the stumps, grub out the roots, and fence the fields before it could really be a farm. Worse than this, the place was mortgaged. The little clearing of twenty acres, with the imperfect cultivation which one weak woman, unaided, could give it, had to be depended on, not only to furnish food for herself and the four children, but to pay taxes and interest on the mortgage, and gradually to lessen the principal of the debt itself. The pioneer population of the country was as poor as herself, hardly able to raise sufficient grain for bread, and reduced almost to starvation by the failure of a single crop. So fearful were the odds against the plucky little widow that her friends pointed out the overwhelming difficulties of the situation, and earnestly advised her to let her children be distributed among the neighbors for bringing up. Firmly but kindly she put aside their well-meant efforts. With invincible courage and an iron will, she said: “My family must not be separated. It is my wish and duty to raise these children myself. No one can care for them like a mother.” It is from such a mother that great men are born. She lost no time in irresolution, but plunged at once into the roughest sort of men’s labor. The wheat-field was only half fenced; the precious harvest which was to be their sustenance through the winter was still ungathered, and would be destroyed by roving cattle, which had been turned loose during the forest fires. The emergency had to be met, and she met it. Finding in the woods some trees, fresh fallen beneath her husband’s glittering ax, she commenced the hard work of splitting rails. At first she succeeded poorly; her hands became blistered, her arms sore, and her heart sick. But with practice she improved. Her small arms learned to swing the maul with a steady stroke. Day by day the worm fence crawled around the wheat field, until the ends met.