The community of which the Brownings, man
and wife, became members at their marriage was a wholly self-subsistent
one. The men wore deerskins procured by their own rifles and dressed
and tailored by themselves,--while the women spun and wove both flax
and wool. Powder and lead seem to have been the only things for which
they were dependent on outsiders. Browning's father was an English
soldier, who, escaping from Braddock's massacre, deserted and settled
in the highlands of Western Maryland,--as a place, we suppose, equally
safe from the provost-martial of the redcoat and the tomahawk of the
red man. It is curious to think of the great contrast between father
and son: the one a British soldier of the day of strictest powder and
pigtail; the other, a man who never wore a hat, except in fine
weather,--and in the house, of course, like the rest of his countrymen.
In this case, we find the very purest American type (for Meshach has
not a single Old-World notion) produced in a single generation. We
ourselves have known a parallel instance in the children of a British
soldier who deserted during the War of 1812; in tone of thought,
accent, dialect, and physique they were unmistakably Yankee.
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