7. Explain the following expressions: a. Tollhouse b. Youthful Paul Revere c. Ghost of a chance d. Boom house e. Log-rolling contests f. In the saddle g. Didn't make good SPECIAL ASSIGNMENTS 1. The northern boundary line of Maine and the Aroostook War. 2. How the boundary lines of our state were fixed. 3. The founding of our city (town, village). 4. The lumber industry of our state. 5. Toll bridges. 6. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty. 7. Celebration of the Hundred Years of Peace between Canada and the United States. 8. How paper is made. 9. Give an account of the processes by which a standing tree is made into shingles, planks, or other similar things. 10. Make a list of the common trees in our state which are used for lumber. CHARLES W. ELIOT John Gilley was the tenth child and also the youngest son, and when he was born the family had already been ten years on the island and had transformed it into a tolerable farm. When he began to look about him his father 5 was keeping six cows, a yoke of oxen, two or three young cattle, about fifty sheep, and three or four hogs. Several of the children were already contributing by their labor to the support of the family. The girls, by the time they were twelve years old, were real helpers for the mother. 10 They tended the poultry, made butter, and spun wool. The boys naturally helped in the work of the father. He, unaided except by his boys, had cleared a considerable portion of the island, burning up in so doing a fine growth of trees-spruce, fir, birch, and beech. With his oxen he 15 had broken up the cleared land, hauled off part of the stones and piled them on the protruding ledges, and gradually made fields for grass and other crops. In the earlier years, before flour began to be cheap at the Mount Desert "stores," he had even raised a little wheat on the island; 20 but the main crops besides hay were potatoes and other vegetables for the use of the family and cattle. The son is still living who carried a boatload of wheat to Somesville, had it ground and sifted into three grades, and carried all three back to the island for winter use. The 25 potato bug and potato rot were then unknown, and the island yielded any wished-for amount of potatoes. The family often dug from two to three hundred bushels of potatoes in a season, and fed what they did not want to their cattle and hogs. Food at the island was habitually abundant. It was no trouble to get lobsters. No traps were needed; they 5 could be picked up in the shallow water along the rocky shore. Fresh fish were always to be easily procured, except in stormy weather and in cold and windy February and March. A lamb could be killed at any time in the summer. In the fall, in sorting the flock of sheep, the 10 family killed from ten to fifteen sheep, and what they could not use as fresh mutton they salted. Later in the season, when the weather turned cold, they killed a "beef critter," and sometimes two when the family grew large. Part of this beef was salted, but part was kept frozen 15 throughout the winter to be used fresh. Sea birds added to their store of food. Shooting them made sport for the boys. Ducks and other sea fowl were so abundant in the fall that the gunners had to throw away the bodies of the birds, after picking off all the feathers. The family 20 never bought any salt pork, but every winter made a year's supply. Although codfish were easily accessible, the family made no use of salt cod. They preferred mackerel, which were to be taken in the near waters in some month of every year. They had a few nets, but they also caught 25 mackerel on the hook. During the summer and early autumn the family had plenty of fresh vegetables. For clothing the family depended mostly on wool from their own sheep. They used very little cotton. There were spinning wheels and looms in the house, and the 30 mother both spun and wove. Flax they raised on the island, and from it made a coarse kind of linen, chiefly for towels. They did, however, buy a cotton warp, and filled it with wool, thus making a comfortable sort of sheet for winter use or light blanket for summer. The wool of at least fifty sheep was used every year in the household when the family had grown large. The chils dren all went barefoot the greater part of the year, but in the winter they wore shoes or boots, the eldest brother having learned enough of the shoemaker's art to keep the family supplied with footwear in winter. At that time there were no such things as rubber boots, and the family 10 did not expect to have dry feet. Their uses for money were few; but some essentials to comfort they must procure at the store, seven miles away, at Southwest Harbor, in return for money or its equivalent. Their available resources for procuring money 15 were very much like those of similar families today in the same neighborhood. They could sell or exchange butter and eggs at the store, and they could sell in Boston dried fish and feathers. One of John's elder brothers shot birds enough in a single year to yield over a hundredweight of 20 feathers, worth fifty cents a pound in Boston. The family shipped their feathers to Boston every year by a coasting vessel; and this product represented men's labor, whereas the butter and eggs represented chiefly the women's labor. The butter was far the best of the cash resources, and so it remains to this day in these islands. It sold in the vicinity at twelve and a half cents a pound. There was one other source of money; namely, herring. Herring abound in these waters but had at that time no value for bait; but smoked herring could be sold in New York 30 (which was the best market for them) at from seventyfive cents to one dollar and ten cents a box, each box holding half a bushel. The herring were caught, for the most part, in gill nets, for there were then no weirs and no 25 seines. The family had their own smokehouse and made the boxes themselves from lumber which was sawed for them at the Somesville or the Duck Brook sawmill. Each of these sawmills was at least nine miles distant from Baker's Island; so that it was a serious undertaking, re- 5 quiring favorable weather, to boat the lumber from the mill and land it safely at the rough home beach. The family nailed the boxes together out of the sawed lumber in the early fall, and packed them with the fragrant fish; and then some coasting vessel, usually a schooner owned in 10 a neighboring island, carried the finished product to distant New York and brought back, after a month or two, clear cash to pay for the winter's stores. In this large and united family the boys stayed at home and worked for their parents until they were twenty-one 15 years of age, and the girls stayed at home until they were married and had homes of their own or had come of age. All the boys and three of the girls were ultimately married. The three girls who did not marry went away from home to earn money by household labor, factory work, nursing, 20 or sewing. It was not all work for the children on the island or, indeed, for the father and mother. In the long winter evenings they played checkers and fox and geese, and the mother read to the family until the children grew old enough to take their share in reading aloud. Out of 25 doors they played ball, and in winter coasted on the snow. The boys, as soon as they were ten or twelve years of age, were in and out of boats much of the time and so attained that quick, instinctive use of oar, sail, and tiller in which lies safety. When they grew older they had the sport of gunning, with the added interest of profit from the feathers. Their domestic animals were a great interest as well as a great care. Then, they always had before them 30 |