oaks.

Thus, when he took up his claim of three hundred
and sixty acres of land in the wilderness of northern
Michigan, and sent my mother and five young chil-
dren to live there alone until he could join us eighteen
months later, he gave no thought to the manner in
which we were to make the struggle and survive
the hardships before us. He had furnished us with
land and the four walls of a log cabin. Some day,
he reasoned, the place would be a fine estate, which
his sons would inherit and in the course of time pass
on to their sons--always an Englishman's most iri-
descent dream. That for the present we were one
hundred miles from a railroad, forty miles from the
nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any
neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats; that
we were wholly unlearned in the ways of the woods
as well as in the most primitive methods of farming;
that we lacked not only every comfort, but even
the bare necessities of life; and that we must begin,
single-handed and untaught, a struggle for existence
in which some of the severest forces of nature would
be arrayed against us--these facts had no weight
in my father's mind. Even if he had witnessed my
mother's despair on the night of our arrival in our
new home, he would not have understood it. From
his viewpoint, he was doing a man's duty. He was
working steadily in Lawrence, and, incidentally,
giving much time to the Abolition cause and to