
THE SONS OF 
before he reached the house both were 
frozen in his arms and died soon after. 
_ Other neighbors came to the rescue and 
the lifeless body of the third child was - 
soon returned. The children’s parents 
suffered long from their own injuries 
and David Brown was blind for the 
rest of his life in consequence of the 
exposure of that terrible morning. 
No medal commemorates the hero- 
ism of David Brown’s self-sacrifice for 
his neighbors and it needs none. It is 
but one of the chronicles of that ob- 
scure little New Hampshire hamlet 
which are cherished in the hearts of the 
sons of its settlers and which have be- 
come part of the everlasting fabric of 
their noble example. 
Another and less tragic occurrence 
in the unwritten annals of the town 
serves to illustrate the methods which 
were in vogue to rebuke any tendency 
toward non-conformity to the prevail- 
ing standard of neighborliness. 
A narrow and selfish man named 
Mason lived at the very end of a 
“mountain road,” somewhat apart from 
his neighbors. He naturally wanted 
the town authorities to keep the high- 
way to his house in good repair, but he 
unfortunately had made conspicuous 
and noisy opposition to the keeping 
open of similar roads in the other parts 
of the town. One dark and rainy 
Saturday night a large force of his 
townsmen secretly assembled with their 
teams at the point where Mason’s road 
branched off and there built a heavy 
and handsome stone wall, so that when 
he started with his family for church 
on Sunday morning he found himself a 
prisoner, as far as driving out was con- 
cerned, until by two or three days’ labor 
he could remove the obstruction. But 
this was not the end. Some nights 
later the wall was rebuilt, stronger 
than before. When the man had finally 
succeeded in opening his way out for 
the second time, his unneighborly mala- 
dy had completely left him. 
It has been said that the trials and 
privations of their lives engraved them- 
THE’ SETTLERS 
511 
selves upon the faces of the pioneers 
in such deep and ineffaceable lines that 
they partook of the very character of 
the granite hills which looked upon 
their struggles. It would indeed be 
strange if there were not some reflec- 
tion in the appearance of men and 
women who met undaunted so stern a 
conflict as confronted the pioneers, but 
it must not be forgotten that there was 
a lighter and a brighter side to it. 
They did not want for pleasure; 
whether it was “muster” or “town - 
meetin’,’ a house-raising or other par- 
tially festive occasion, mirth and frolic 
played their parts. Labor, though 
regular and constant, was seldom over- 
strenuous or exhausting and time was 
taken for food and sleep. As Grannie, 
in Kellogg’s immortal “Good Old 
Times,” so well expresses it, ‘““Mother 
always said she never got her property 
by getting up early or sitting up late, 
but by working after she was up.’ It 
is a mistake to suppose that the poor 
are chained down to unremitting toil. 
They at least know the taste of leisure 
and ease; their days are made porous 
so to speak with little interruptions and 
diversions. Even their very poverty, 
in its complete diffusion, in its ex- 
istence as a normal condition, like the 
pressure of the atmosphere, ceased to 
be felt at all. 
There was a simplicity in their lives 
as of a winter landscape, freshness as 
of an April morning, invitation to life 
as to a feast; the ends of living stood 
paramount to the means; the germs of 
knowledge and aspiration unfolded un- 
der the stimulus of a personal, first- 
hand experience. Their poverty denied 
them the perilous privilege of mounting 
a staging built by others; it quickened 
their powers of invention, and stimu- 
lated their self-reliance; it compelled 
them, as Thoreau says, to build upon 
piles of their own driving. How well 
they built, how much we owe them for 
the stable structure that stands as their 
everlasting monument, we of a later 
day should be slow to forget. 
(To be continued ) 
