The Newberry herald and news. (Newberry, S.C.) 1884-1903, 1891-06-25
THE DUTCH PORK.
BY DIR. 0. 2. MAYER. SR.
No. 6.

No 6.
ut thy command,
Again the crunlbled halls shall rise;
Lo. as on Evans bank we stand,
The past returuS-:ae present flies.
CADyow CASTLE
I have come to know, in common
with few others necessarily few
and such fellowship of knowledge is
really very sweet,-weaning us, as it
does, from attachment to the visible
present and inducing us to look back,
'syearning for infancy" upon the shift
ing road we have travelled from child
!. hood to old age;-I have come to
know, I say, that much of what has
long been lying almost in forgetfu!ness,
when it once more gains access to our
recollection, appears with more vivid
ness and eXactness than do recent
thir IS lettering in our minds. These,
belonging to the last ten or fifteen years
of old age, are thrust aside under the
intrusion of new thoughts and actions
rapidly recurring, and they drift more
aud more out of remembrance during
the short remainder of an .old mans
life; but the events of long ago, after
having faded during half century into
indistinctness, mysteriously return to
old people, like spirits risen from graves,
make their way through the throng-of
circumstances surrounding declining
life, and hold up the claims Of child
hood,-pointing to the scripture: Tx
cept ye be converted, and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into
the kingdom of heaven. To illustrate
most beautifully this idea of retracing
our way, in thought, towards the COM
mencement OF our lives, invited by the
recovered brightness of our earliest ex-
periences, I quote Paul Haynes en-
trancing lines-the last lines ofhis poem
entitled, ''The Valley of Anostan."
Abiding to one who had thus retraced
the path Of his life to its beginning, the
Poet writes:
His soul grew fresh, dew-like and sweet again,
And through his past, his golden yesterdays,
He wandered hack and back till youth, re-
gained,
Shone in the candid radiance Of his eyes,
That still waxed larger, holier, crystal-clear,
With resurrection of life's tenderest dawn
OF child-like faith; by which illumed and
warned,
He walks, himself dream within dream,
s>Yearning for infancy. This found at last,
IGently he passes upward unto God,
Not through deaths portal wrapped in storm
and wrath,
But the fair archway Of the gates OF birth.
Though this allusion to the remark
able mental condition so generally ex-
perieneed by old persons, reviewing in
freshness the scenes of early life, may
be somewhat out of place in an un-
dertaking like this, nevertheless it Will
enable me ian old man, myself to pro-
ceed with greater confidence in the
correctness of the statements I have to
present.
I'm. an old lumber house on the prem
ises where I was born, and where L
passed much Of my early life, fire.
quently saw and examined three decay
ing, cast away implements. For more
than thirty years they had passed out
of my thoughts; but now, since l yield
to the magic by which
The past returns the present flies,
; their shape is so definitely brought
back to my memory, that with q pencil
and piece of paper could max de-
lineation Of it sufficiently accurate to
guide IN artizan in reproducing one.
They were called flaX-breakers, and
were used in the Dutch Fork, before
the cultivation of cotton, to break into
very short fragments the stalks of the
fax-plant, so that they could be easily
separated from the rough bark after
the process of rotting. 1t seems like
an Almighty beneficent design, that
the woody part of the fax-plant should
undergo such rapid decay through heat
and moisture, which the fibrous bark
almost defes the laws of decomposi-
tion. More than four hundred years
ago few nights exposure to dampness
and to the heat of the sun for as many
days removed the flaX-stalks in rotten
pulp from quantity of fibre which
was woven into q fabric that received
from the brush of Raphael the paint
ing of the TRANSPORTATION, has kept it
J fresh to the present day, and will last
to keep it for four hundred years longer.
The same car be said in regard to hun
dreds ofother masterpieces ofpainting.
Strange! that a stuff of such little dura
biiity as cotton should ever threaten to
become substitute for linen,-cotton,
the very symbol Of rottenness and de-
cay, while linen is the symbolic i'm
mortal material for the marriage dress
of the Lambs Bride,-to he arrayed in
fine linen, clean and white.
The rough mass left by the separa-
ton of the broken stalks from the bark,
must now be drawn across a hackle, to
straighten out the fbers. This hack!e
was made by firmly fixing thirty or
forty sharp steel points four or five
iuches long in q thick piece Of wood
ten inches square. Cne Of these, no
longer in use, lay for several years in
the loft of an old clubhouse. I saw it
frequently; and my thoughts quickly
turned to it, when /, for the first time,
read Burns Address to the Toothaehe,
-pausing at the stanza where he so
cruelty writes:
Adown my beard the s!averS trickle;
throw the Wee stools DER the nlickle,
As round the fire the giglets kcckle