A Man for the Ages | Page 4

VEILED BEAR.
In the early summer of 1831 Samson Traylor and his wife, Sarah, and
two children left their old home near the village of Vergennes, Vermont,
and began their travels toward the setting sun with four chairs, a bread
board and rolling-pin, a feather bed and blankets, a small looking-glass,
a skillet, an axe, a pack basket with a pad of sole leather on the same, a
water pail, a box of dishes, a tub of salt pork, a rifle, a teapot, a sack of
meal, sundry small provisions and a violin, in a double wagon drawn
by oxen. It is a pleasure to note that they had a violin and were not
disposed to part with it. The reader must not overlook its full historic
significance. The stern, uncompromising spirit of the Puritan had left
the house of the Yankee before a violin could enter it. Humor and the
love of play had preceded and cleared a way for it. Where there was a
fiddle there were cheerful hearts. A young black shepherd dog with
tawny points and the name of Sambo followed the wagon or explored
the fields and woods it passed.
If we had been at the Congregational Church on Sunday we might have
heard the minister saying to Samson, after the service, that it was hard
to understand why the happiest family in the parish and the most
beloved should be leaving its ancestral home to go to a far, new country
of which little was known. We might also have heard Samson answer:
"It's awful easy to be happy here. We slide along in the same old
groove, that our fathers traveled, from Vergennes to Paradise. We work
and play and go to meetin' and put a shin plaster in the box and grow
old and narrow and stingy and mean and go up to glory and are turned
into saints and angels. Maybe that's the best thing that could happen to
us, but Sarah and I kind o' thought we'd try a new starting place and
another route to Heaven."
Then we might have seen the countenance of the minister assume a
grave and troubled look. "Samson, you must not pull down the pillars
of this temple," he said.

"No, it has done too much for me. I love its faults even. But we have
been called and must go. A great empire is growing up in the West. We
want to see it; we want to help build it."
The minister had acquired a sense of humor among those Yankees.
Years later in his autobiography he tells how deeply the words of
Samson had impressed him. He had answered:
"Think of us. I don't know what we shall do without your fun and the
music of your laugh at the pleasure parties. In addition to being the best
wrestler in the parish you are also its most able and sonorous laugher."
"Yes, Sarah and I have got the laughing habit. I guess we need a touch
of misery to hold us down. But you will have other laughers. The seed
has been planted here and the soil is favorable."
Samson knew many funny stories and could tell them well. His heart
was as merry as _The Fisher's Hornpipe_. He used to say that he got
the violin to help him laugh, as he found his voice failing under the
strain.
Sarah and Samson had been raised on adjoining farms just out of the
village. He had had little schooling, but his mind was active and well
inclined. Sarah had prosperous relatives in Boston and had had the
advantage of a year's schooling in that city. She was a comely girl of a
taste and refinement unusual in the place and time of her birth. Many
well favored youths had sought her hand, but, better than others, she
liked the big, masterful, good-natured, humorous Samson, crude as he
was. Naturally in her hands his timber had undergone some planing and
smoothing and his thought had been gently led into new and pleasant
ways. Sarah's Uncle Rogers in Boston had kept them supplied with
some of the best books and magazines of the time. These they had read
aloud with keen enjoyment. Moreover, they remembered what they
read and cherished and thought about it.
Let us take a look at them as they slowly leave the village of their birth.
The wagon is covered with tent cloth drawn over hickory arches. They
are sitting on a seat overlooking the oxen in the wagon front. Tears are

streaming down the face of the woman. The man's head is bent. His
elbows are resting on his knees; the hickory handle of his ox whip lies
across his lap, the lash at his feet. He seems to be looking