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Michigan STARTING LIFE ANEW IN THE WOODS
STARTING LIFE ANEW IN THE WOODS.
The new home was so entirely secluded in the woods, that we felt, on entering it, like going into hermitage. We do not know the value of a thing until
it is lacked or lost, says the poet. We had lost a home—the old one in New York, and here we realized its full value; for we felt homeless as we went into this rude cabin. Nothing but ourselves and the little household furniture we had brought, to remind us of the old home. If, as before stated, we missed some of our favorite birds in the woods about us, we, on the other hand within doors, were not troubled with the house-fly, the mischievous mouse or the destructive rat. It was a long time before either of them made their appearance among us. After we had been here a year without having seen a person, or a living thing, that we had once known in New York, my mother, one day, on opening a book, found a house-fly that had been caught and preserved between the leaves. She exclaimed—"Here is a fly from York State! Now children, don't touch it—let it remain here in this book, just as it is; for it is a fly that once lived in our old home. " We had been here five years before we saw a person whom we had ever known before. Mr. Wood, then living at Battle Creek came to see us. He had only known of our family in New York, but here he seemed an old-time friend.
Out of doors was beautiful, wild Michigan. Our cattle had a boundless range to feed and roam over, in the oak openings, which were not like the woods of New York, "all a tangle with cut briers and underbrush, " but clean and trim, no fences, roads or even a track, save the deer paths and Indian trails that meandered through them.
Early Michigan
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