He trusts to their protection to save
him from falling trees and flying limbs, although he is often lacerated
and bruised, jambed and torn by them. I knew a man and a boy in our town
who were killed by falling limbs. Sometimes he is cut by the ax and is
obliged to go home, over logs, between stumps and through brush, leaving
a bloody trail behind him.
Father's farm was rescued from the wilderness and consecrated to the plow
and husbandry through sweat and blood. We ofttimes encountered perils and
were weary from labor, often times hungry and thirsty, often suffered
from cold and heat, frequently destitute of comfortable apparel and
condemned to toil as the universal doom of humanity--thus earning our
bread by the sweat of our brows.
Father and I labored some years in sight of the great elm stump. It
appeared like a giant, with a great hump on his back, overlooking the
surrounding stumps. It was about eight feet high. But it was doomed to
decay, and entirely disappeared long years ago.
The oak tree was more fortunate and escaped the fatal ax, a number of
years after all the timber around it had been chopped and cleared away.
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