Explore "Lost in The Backwoods" by Catharine Parr Strickland Traill on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Scared by the red and noisy light. " -- COLERIDGE.
Hector and Louis had now little employment, except chopping fire-wood, which was no very arduous task for two stout, healthy lads used from childhood to handling the axe. Trapping, and hunting, and snaring hares were occupations which they pursued more for the excitement and exercise than from hunger, as they had laid by abundance of dried venison, fish, and birds, besides a plentiful store of rice. They now visited those trees that they had marked in the summer, where they had noticed the bees hiving, and cut them down. In one they got more than a pailful of rich honeycomb, and others yielded some more, some less; this afforded them a delicious addition to their boiled rice and dried acid fruits. They might have melted the wax and burned candles of it; but this was a refinement of luxury that never once occurred to our young housekeepers: the dry pineknots that are found in the woods are the settlers' candles.