The scene of this history is an Arkansas village, on the bank of the Mississippi; the time, a great many years ago. The houses were small and unpretentious; some few were of frame, the others of logs; a very few were whitewashed, but none were painted; nearly all the fences leaned outward or inward and were more or less dilapidated. The whole village had a lazy, tired, neglected look. The river bank was high and steep, and here and there an aged, crazy building stood on the edge with a quarter or a half of itself overhanging the water, waiting forlorn and tenantless for the next freshet to eat the rest of the ground from under it and let the stream swallow it. This was a town that was always moving westward. Twice a year, regularly, in the dead of winter and in the dead of summer, the great river called for the front row of the village’s possessions, and always got it. It took the front farms, the front orchards, the front gardens; those front houses that were worth hauling away, were moved to the rear by ox-power when the danger-season approached; those that were not worth this trouble were timely deserted and left to cave into the river. If a man lived obscurely in a back street and chafed under this fate, he only needed to have patience; his back street would be the front street by and by.

[begin page 25] Above and below the town, dense forests came flush to the bank; and twice a year they delivered their front belt of timber into the river. The village site, and the corn and cotton fields in the rear had been formerly occupied by trees as thick as they could stand, and the stumps remained in streets, yards and fields as a memento of the fact. All the houses stood upon “underpinning,” which raised them two or three feet above the ground, and under each house was usually a colony of hogs, dogs, cats and other creatures, mostly of a noisy kind. The village stood on a dead level, and the houses were propped above ground to keep the main floors from being flooded by the semi-annual overflow of the river.

There were no sidewalks, no pavements, no stepping stones; therefore, on a spring day the streets were either several inches deep with dust or as many inches deep with thick black mud. People slopped through this mud on foot or horseback, the hogs wallowed in it without fear of molestation, wagons got stuck fast in it, and while the drivers lashed away with their long whips and swore with power, coatless, jeans-clad loafers stood by with hands in pockets and sleepily enjoyed this blessed interruption of the customary monotony until a dog-fight called them to higher pleasure. When the dog-fight ended they adjourned to the empty dry-goods boxes in front of the poor little stores and whittled and expectorated and discussed the fight and the merits of the dogs that had taken part in it.

One of the largest dwellings in this village of Tupperville was the home of the widow Bennett and her family. It was built of logs, and stood in the back part of the town next to the corn and cotton-fields. In the common sitting room was a mighty fire place, paved with slabs of stone shaped by nature and worn smooth by use. TheⒶemendation oaken floor in front of it was thickly freckled, as far as the middle of the room, with black spots burned in it by coals popped out from the hickory fire-wood. There was no carpeting anywhere; but there was a spinning wheel in one corner, a bed in another, with a white counterpane, a dinner table with leaves, in another, a tall eight-day clock in the fourth corner, a dozen splint-bottom chairs scattered around, several guns resting upon deer-horns over the mantel piece, and generally a cat or a hound or two [begin page 26] curled up on the hearth-stones asleep. This was the family sitting room; it was also the dining room and the widow Bennett’s bed-chamber. The rest of the house was devoted to sleeping apartments for the other members of the household. A planked passage-way, twenty feet wide, open at the sides but roofed above, extended from the back sitting room door to the log kitchen; and beyond the kitchen stood the smoke-house and three or four little dismal log cabins, otherwise the “negro quarter.”

Since this house was in all ways much superior to the average of the Dobbsville residences, it will be easily perceived that the average residence was necessarily a very marvel of rudeness, nakedness, and simplicity.