sister was the second, she not only did the daily household duties,
including washing and baking, but spun and wove the cloth for the
clothes of her husband and children, cut and made them up. Her
cheerful faith in an overruling Providence must have been, in those
days, a supreme consolation, for, even in recalling them in the days
of my boyhood, the light of it still illumined her, and she never
questioned that He who had led them into the wilderness would maintain
them in it. She seemed to have but one care in her life while I knew
her--to know and do her duty. She found a special providence in
every instance of relief from their pressing wants, and I recall the
religious serenity with which she told me of the greatest strait of
the hardest winter of that period, when resources seemed to have been
exhausted to the last crumb, and they unexpectedly received from one
of her half brothers, who had gone farther west, and lived in what was
practically the wilderness, a barrel of salted pigeons' breasts.
There had been one of those almost fabulous flights of the now nearly
extinct passenger pigeons, which used to come north to breed in such
numbers that the forests where they colonized were so filled with
their nests that the settlers went into them and beat the young down
with poles, and the branches became so overloaded with the broods in
their nests that their weight often broke them down and threw the
young on the ground. They had that year chosen the forests in my
uncle's neighborhood for their nesting ground, and had been killed by
thousands and salted down for winter provision, only the breast being
used, owing to the superabundance of the birds. The gift came like the
answer to a prayer, for there was hunger in the house and the snow was
heavy on the ground, all the community being more or less in the same
straits.

Being the youngest of nine children, I can remember my mother only in