A Country Life
by William S. Morse
1995 - ISBN 0-9642213-1-4
Paperback, 136 pages, $9.95
True stories of life on the farm and in the woods of the North Country in the early part of the century, by one who was there.

One-room-schools, horses, cider, privies, lumberjacks, Prohibition, and more.

About Bill Morse

"There are, perhaps, a few other sharp Yankees in their nineties whose memories are impressive and who write well and with a sense of humor. Bill Morse stands alone, however, with his particular mix of rural Yankee heritage, boyhood summers atop Mount Moosilauke, careers as a surveyor and logging boss, and colorful characters encountered.

"In the course of his writing, he chronicles many changes of the twentieth century. The boy who turned eleven on Moosilauke in 1915 and whose winter home was a farm in the valley below regarded automobiles,telephones, and electric power as novelties. Eighty years later the same boy again stood on the summit, gazing out across the vastness and remembering; traveler and eyewitness on the long road from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first."

Some comments about A Country Life

Monitor Radio - Lisa Dale:
". . . an oldtimer tells what the 'Good Old Days' were really like."

The Boston Globe - Lois Shea:
". . . a memory that dips into the early part of the century and brings up images clear as well water. Tales of outhouses and thunder mugs, of milking cows and swatting flies, of freezing in uninsulated farmhouses in winter, sweltering in haylofts in summer. Tales of hill farmers and lumberjacks, school teachers and blacksmiths."

The Valley News - Willem Lange:
"The Rural New England Lifestyle that Currier and Ives Ignored."

The Journal Opinion - Gary W. Moore:
"Anyone who wants to learn what life was really like in northern New England in the early years of this century should read A Country Life."

The N.H. Sunday News - Mel Thomson:
"A Country Life will give you several hours of fun and quite a few chuckles."

Some Excerpts

Horses
". . . Old Lewis never drove anything but a wreck of a horse. I guess he wanted people to feel sorry for him. He traded horses quite often, and he had some trick of rejuvenating them just before he traded that made them look as if they were something. You could tell when Lewis was planning to trade, for his old wreck would begin to blossom. My father claimed that he fed them arsenic. He said that you could start feeding an old bag of bones a little arsenic, increasing the dose bit by bit, and soon have him fleshed out and looking like a new horse. The catch was that when you stopped feeding him the arsenic the horse quickly reverted back to an old bag of bones or, more likely, he died. It may have been so. I can remember one time when Lewis stopped at our place to show off a new horse that he had just obtained in a trade. He liked to brag about his trading prowess. The next morning he went out to the barn to feed him and the horse was dead. My father and grandfather thought it was a huge joke. Someone had beat old Lewis at his own trick by trading him a horse that had been fed arsenic. . . ."

Logs
". . . Another saw that they sent us was a circular saw about twenty inches in diameter that was mounted between two bicycle wheels so that it could be wheeled through the woods. The saw was mounted at the end of a long handle that was swiveled so that it could be used to cut vertically or horizontally. Whoever put it together probably had a vision of wheeling it up to a tree and sawing it down and then turning the blade over and sawing the tree into pulpwood lengths. It might have worked in a park, but it was of no use in the rock bound hills of Vermont. We tried using it to saw pulpwood in the yard, but found out that it was a lethal thing. If the saw inadvertently hit the ground while it was running, it would gallop away through the woods at a terrific speed, gyrating wildly until it destructed itself by hitting trees or stones. . . ."

Bender
". . . Charlie, the jobber, was as bad as any of his men. One morning, when he was drunk, he got mad at the cook and went for him with a butcher knife shouting, "Me kill!" The cook, whose name was Hebert, had a huge skillet on the stove in which he had a mess of eggs and bacon frying in sizzling hot fat. "Not me." he said, and he upended the skillet, hot eggs, bacon and fat over Charlie's head. It tamed him down and burned him so badly that he had to go to the hospital. Hebert walked out, and we had to find a new cook for Charlie. . . ."

The 18th
". . . The rum runners were a wily bunch and were well organized. The cars which the agents captured were confiscated and sold at public auction where the runners promptly bid them off and put them back to work. A car loaded so heavily that it sagged to the axles would be vigorously pursued by federal agents, and it would lead them a merry chase over the countryside. When the agents caught up with it, they would find it loaded with bags of grain or some other innocent material. Meanwhile, a dozen cars or a couple of trucks with heavy loads of liquor would amble through town and along the route without any fear of pursuit. Country sheriffs and local police were only interested in their territory and were usually open to pay-offs. . . ."

Table of Contents
 
Introduction by Noel Perrin
The Country Life
Dobbin
Chores
School
Helping Out
Paydirt
Gramp
Mom
Food
Cyder		 Privy Matters
Horses
Horseless
Visitors
Mountain Years
Logs
Jacks
Bender
The 18th
Landmarks