There was no lack of social enjoyment, for their hardest toil was made the occasion of a gathering.  If a piece of woodland was to be cleared, or a fallow, the male portion of the community united in a “bee” and the work was soon done.  Perhaps, while the men were thus working together in the field, the women had gathered within doors, and were busily plying their fingers over the mottled patch-work of a quilt.  In the lengthening summer twilight the men, coatless and barefoot, sat in groups on the front steps or under the low Dutch stoops and talked of the incoming crops, the weather or the watery moon.

The forests, all over the hillsides, where now village streets are creeping up and winding across, were frowning with great pines and hemlocks.  The log road ran in every direction and was no more exclusive than a common highway.  The “shingle-weaver’s” huts were on nearly every road and bypath.  The most towering pines were regarded as lawful prize, and during the winter the men found plenty of employment and slight recompense in hauling the pines to mill.  Here they were converted into lumber, which was piled up by the bank of the river until “the spring freshet.”  On the swollen stream it was rafted to Baltimore, Harrisburg and other places.

The “rafting season” was looked forward to with no little solicitude by the more robust and daring of the young men.  They waited for the rafts to be cut from their moorings with keen anticipation, and the stories of some of the rivermen are still well remembered by the older inhabitants.

For a great many years, Albany was the only market to which the pioneers carted their wheat.  The roads were barely passable and the trip to Albany and back required from six to eight days.  The wagons, upon which the produce was carted, were of rough and clumsy make.  It would not be supposed that the driver would find much pleasure in making the distance to market and back on one of these clumsy vehicles, but the trip, especially to the younger men, was not without its enjoyments.  They carried their provisions in a large, round, wooden box over which closed a round, wooden cover.  They also carried provender for their teams and the only necessary cash expense was a sixpence each night for lodging.  The more sumptuous and less economical might, if they chose, diminish their exchequer to the amount of an extra sixpence by indulging in a glass of “flip.”  Nearly every farm-house of any pretension on the high road to Albany was a hotel, so-called, if not in fact.  Seated at night within these primitive hotels, the farmers who had assembled from different parts told their tales of prowess—­some true stories and a good many lies.

Beside the ambitious house that gloried in a daub of red paint and which had been pushed up to the aristocratic height of one and a half or two stories, before which flapped in the wind a wide, white board with the cheerful announcement, “Smith’s Inn—­Refreshments for Man or Beast,” stood a more modest structure.  Brown, unpainted, unclapboarded, it stood by the wayside.  Its log walls were stuccoed with mud, and in the wide mouth of the doorway was the brawny housewife, bare-armed, peering from beneath a slatternly red sun-bonnet, while over the doorway the passer-by read the letters in red chalk upon a new pine shingle: