William Dean Howells 
My Year In A Log Cabin [EPUB ebook] 

Mr. Howells’ father, who was a Welshman, moved to a property on the Little Miami River in southern Ohio to take charge of a sawmill and gristmill and superintend their transformation into paper-mills. Mr. Howells describes a year of this life in a half-settled country, and tells how perfectly happy he was in his home-life and how intensely he suffered from homesickness when obliged to leave his mother to help earn money for a large family. Somehow or other, when Mr. Howells writes ff his boyhood, there is always a tinge of sadness about him. With his love for the comrades of his youth there breathe, as it were, notes of sorrow because they are no longer of the earth. Mr. Howells’s emotional instincts in his younger days may not have been at the surface, but were certainly deep in his heart. Nothing he ever wrote can be more tender than the reminiscences of this year spent in a log cabin somewhere in Ohio.