They spent that on lodgings for the night. The next morning, Josiah began looking for work. Someone told him about a farmer named Hibbard, who lived six or seven miles inland, and whose reputation, as Henson delicately put it, “was not, by any means, unexceptionably good,” but who needed a man used to hard labor. Modesty was never one of Henson’s limitations, and he quickly convinced the man to take him on. When Henson asked Hibbard if there was a place for his family to live, he “led the way to an old two-story sort of shanty, into the lower story of which the pigs had broken, and had apparently made it their resting place for some time. Still it was a house, and I forthwith expelled the pigs, and set about cleaning it for the occupancy of a better sort of tenants.” If Henson felt disappointment—had he really risked the lives of family just to wind up in a pig sty?—there was no trace of it in his memory of that wondrous day. He scrubbed, scraped, and mopped far into the night to clean the pigs’ filth from the floor.
