Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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Earlier in this writing I mentioned the fact that our family had three years on the Hazeltine farm. My older brother, Charley, contracted “quick consumption.” There was a prevailing notion that the scent of new pine lumber and fresh country air would be helpful in effecting a cure. So my father made a contract with Charley Hazeltine for the erection of a new house under the cottonwoods on the hill near the old log-house which had been the home of father of the Hazeltine brothers—with a three-year lease on 40 acres of farm land.

The new house had plenty of exposed pine lumber and fresh air all right. It was a box-house made of barn-boards, unplastered, with sleeping quarters in the loft, comparable to the hay-mow in a barn, reached by a ladder from one corner of the ground-floor room. On occasions, snow sifted through the cracks in the loft, covering my bed completely. The lower room was more closely built, which was living room, kitchen, and sleeping quarters for my parents—and the babies. There was a standard sized bed, and a trundle bed—the latter shoved under the regular bed in the daytime, and pulled out to the middle of the room at night. It was a replica of many another home of that day, only the others could have added protection of plastered walls. Then too, it was Dr. Thomas Milam’s belief that Charley would show improvement in the new home with the coming of spring. But, come time for the swelling of the buds of those old cottonwoods in the spring of 1879, the “Grim Reaper” beat the carpenters to the finish. Charley had died before the new house was ready for occupancy. And that made long lonesome hours for me on the farm. Charley had an enviable record as an exemplary boy—and, try as I might, I have not been able to follow wholly in his foot-steps. But I am sure that my memory of him has helped to make me what I am.