This is conviviality; but it has no relation
to drunkenness. Every household has its family altar; and every night,
before retiring to rest, the family circle gather round the father or
the husband, who devoutly commends them to the keeping of God.
The common school is a log hut, built by the wayside, and the
"schoolmarm" is not a pretentious person. But, what the school cannot
supply, a long line of intelligent, independent ancestors have supplied,
robust, common sense and sagacity.
Something of the gloom and sternness of the forest, something of the
sadness which is a conscious presence, is in their faces. Their humor
has a certain savor of grimness. For the rest, it may be said that they
are poor, and that they make little effort to be anything else. They do
a little farming and a little lumbering. They get food and clothing,
they are attached to their homesteads, and the world with all its
tempting possibilities passes them by. The young people seek the States,
but even they return, and end their days in the old home. They marry,
and get farms, and life moves with even step, the alternating seasons,
with their possibilities, probably forming their deepest absorptions.
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