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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
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OLD-TIME CHILD-LIFE. 
 
 BY 
 
 E. H. ARE, 
 
 Author of "New England Bygones." 
 
 "% 
 
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 piiiladelpuia: 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 1881. 
 
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 Copyright, 1880, by J. B. Lippincott & Co. 
 
TO 
 
 ALL COUNTRY-BORN BOYS AND GIRLS 
 AND TO THEIR MOTHERS, 
 
 THIS LITTLE BOOK 
 
 IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 These truthful sketches have Ijccn written 
 with a desire to turn the attention of young 
 people to the charms of quiet country life. 
 They are offered to those older hoys and girls 
 who, wliile still retaining a simple taste in 
 reading, have ceased to he contented with 
 verhal pap. 
 
 So much impressed am I, however, with 
 the dignity of oldtime rural life that I may, 
 in treating of it, have sometimes talked over 
 the heads of my desired audience. If, there- 
 fore, these experiences are told in a style too 
 formal for the taste and capacity of the age 
 for which they are designed, it will he partly 
 hecause of such frame of mind, and partly 
 hecause I have flattered myself that mothers 
 may like to read the little hook to their 
 cliildrcn. 
 
G PREFACE. 
 
 I trust it is not too simple to interest the 
 mothers. If it is, I beg pardon for the harm- 
 less delusion of thinking that the childhood 
 of other countrj-born women could have been 
 as easily made happy as my own. 
 
 E. H. A. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. — East Koad and Whitefield Corner . 9 
 
 II.— The Staqe-Coach 23 
 
 III.— Dear Old Folks 32 
 
 IV. — Wayside Things 44 
 
 v.— West Koad 51 
 
 VI.— Now AND Then 61 
 
 VII. — Safford's Brook 70 
 
 VIII.— Rock-Work 80 
 
 IX. — Deacon Saunders 91 
 
 X.— Fires 104 
 
 XI. — Parson Meeker 115 
 
 XII.— One Gala-Day 127 
 
 XIII.— Bowdy-Place 130 
 
 XIV. — Whitefield Academy .... 144 
 
 XV. — Thanksgiving Dinners .... 152 
 
 XVI.— Lathem's Wood 1G3 
 
 XVII. — Queer Folks 175 
 
OLDTIME CHILDLIFE, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 
 
 Two 'New England villages are dear to my 
 heart, East Road and Whitefield Corner. Each 
 consists of a double row of somewhat widely- 
 separated houses stretching along a highway for 
 half a mile or more. Each is perched on a high 
 ridge of land running through the heart of its 
 town, but Whitefield Corner has much the finer 
 prospect of the two. Such villages often got 
 their names by accident. A Mr. Moore built a 
 mill a few miles from Whitefield Corner, and 
 hence the little hamlet which sprang up around 
 it was known as Moore's Mills. When a village 
 clustered at the meeting of two roads, it was apt 
 to be called a " Corner," — most likely that of 
 the man who kept its first store. The simple 
 fact that its houses were built alongside a main 
 road. gave name to the village of East Road; 
 2 9 
 
10 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 but Whitefield Corner was so called from its 
 town. 
 
 Nothing could be more restful to a traveller, 
 on a summer's day, than to come into one of 
 these tree-bordered streets, with its cool arch- 
 way of overhanging branches. Both East Road 
 and Whitefield Corner were much shaded by 
 trees, mostly elms, whose lower limbs were left 
 untrimmed and hung low. Here and there were 
 clusters of slowly-dying poplars. Villagers 
 seemed to hate to set axe into a tree. One 
 in Whitefield Corner, a giant horse-chestnut, 
 was cut down by a new comer because it 
 shaded his garden. It had stood in the centre 
 of the village, and was mourned ^as if it had 
 been human. Another, the pride of the place, 
 a huge elm, was lost in a curious way. A boy 
 burned a wasps' nest from a fork of one of its 
 branches. Shortly a coil of smoke came out 
 from the tree. Its core of punkwood had 
 caught fire, and its admirers were surprised 
 to find that, for years, the splendid thing had 
 been only a skeleton. Both trees were gi^eatly 
 missed, for the village had nothing left to com- 
 pare with these two kings, — the horse-chestnut 
 in its pyramidal glory, and the elm with its 
 wide spreading shade. 
 
 There were two balm-of-gilead trees before 
 a house at Whitefield Corner, which, though 
 
EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. H 
 
 beautiful, with their double-faced leaves, were 
 the wildest of rovers, sprouting up in gardens 
 and cellars all over the village. They were a 
 bother to their owner, matting his front-yard 
 with rootlets and filling it with suckers ; yet 
 this very fault of their intense vitality took 
 hold of his heart, and he was loath to cut them 
 down. 
 
 The two lawyers of the village were wise 
 men, whose practice took them up and down 
 the steep hills of half their State. When, in 
 winter, they ploughed with sleighs through 
 snow-drifts to " shire-towns," they were as 
 shaggy with wraps as the teamsters whom they 
 met on the way. There were no harder work- 
 ing men to be found anywhere than the best 
 lawyers in oldtime New England towns. The 
 court-room often located, for convenience, in 
 some small village, was the scene of their sharp 
 legal warfare. They drove from one " shire- 
 town" to another, living much upon the road, 
 some of them with their names after almost 
 every case upon the " docket." As a race they 
 were fine men to look at, — erect, robust, with 
 a certain stateliness of manner. The faces of 
 many of them, dead so long, are fresh to me, 
 and they are like a gallery of grand old portraits. 
 
 There was an ofiice in Whitefield Corner of 
 one of these lawyers, — a dingy second-story 
 
12 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 room, full of tables and pigeon-holed desks, 
 its walls lined to the ceiling with books. The 
 floor, in front of its open fire, was actually 
 worn thin by the feet of restless clients, and 
 in one place you could look through a knot- 
 hole into the unplastered store below. It was 
 not a tidy office. I do not believe it was ever 
 cleaned : cobwebs filled its corners, and thick 
 dust lay upon its upper shelves. Its tables were 
 always littered with papers, candlesticks, snuf- 
 fers, inkstands, and old goose-quill pens. Its 
 occupant was the slackest kind of a house- 
 keeper, but he was an able lawyer. He was 
 a college-graduate, an ardent lover of Greek, 
 and, before he became absorbed in the law, a 
 student of classic literature. With an open 
 hand and generous heart, arrogant in his law- 
 practice, but gentle-mannered in social life, he 
 belonged to that old school of gentlemen 
 which, before the days of far-reaching rail- 
 roads, had no better representatives in New 
 England than amongst the professional men 
 of country-life. A vast deal of brain-work was 
 done by this lawyer for thirty years in that 
 dingy office. A rugged clientage, mostly of 
 farmers, kept up a constant tramp over its 
 stairs, — a good sample of the sturdy yeomanry 
 of the State. They hoarded their money in 
 greasy leather pocket-books or in stout bags, 
 
EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 13 
 
 from which they hated to spend it ; but when 
 the lawyer had gained a case for one of them his 
 client was always ready to pay him a fee, and 
 men by whom his almost insolent assumption 
 of legal learning was hard to be borne would 
 ''retain" him because they hated to "have him 
 on the other side." Widows and orphans he 
 was apt to serve without pay, and nothing 
 pleased him better than to help a poor bright 
 young man along, '^o monk in his cell was 
 ever more dead to the outside world than this 
 Whitefield lawyer when getting his cases ready 
 fov court. Elbow-deep in bundles of papers, 
 mousino: throuo:h old law-books, for^ettino: to 
 eat, the dribble of store-barter came up to him 
 unheeded through the hole in the floor, and 
 he was alive only to his clients and his cases. 
 In looking back to him as a citizen of a small 
 village, I delight not so much in his legal abil- 
 ity as I do in the coupling of his wise and 
 broad views of life with a certain simplicity, 
 which made him so dearly love nature that he 
 took root in Whitefield. Hence cities had no 
 charm for him. His last conscious act was the 
 overlooking of a tree which he had set out, 
 grown now into a wide-spreading chestnut, — 
 fitting memorial of this large-brained lawyer, 
 whose heart was as tender as that of a little 
 child. 
 
14 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 A famous doctor lived at East Eoad. He 
 was a handsome man, and was said to be the 
 best suro:eon in all the State. He drove about 
 the country in a low sulky, with a pair of 
 saddle-bags under its seat, and was treated 
 with as much deference as the parson himself. 
 His speech was polished, and his smile was 
 like a benediction. His only daughter, very 
 beautiful, died in early womanhood, and left 
 him more gentle-natured than before. He 
 was as fine a country gentleman as I ever 
 knew. 
 
 Two beautiful elms stood before the front 
 door of his house, which almost drooped their 
 branches into your face. Under one of these 
 the doctor's sulky always stood when he was 
 at home ; so that he needed no other sign. 
 
 Next to the doctor himself, the East Road 
 children reverenced this sulky. They used to 
 tiptoe up to it and peep at the saddle-bags, 
 w^hich not one of them dared to touch. 
 When he came out they all ran to the other 
 side of the road, and curiously watched him 
 until he drove off. If he nodded and smiled 
 at them, which he always did unless he was in 
 a great hurry, instead of nodding back, they 
 huno^ their heads. I did not wonder at their 
 awe of him. The beautiful ripeness of a se- 
 rene old age seemed to be linked with the 
 
EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 15 
 
 vigor of youth in this splendid doctor of East 
 Road. 
 
 When his sulky stopped hefore a door the 
 neighbors sent at once to see who was sick. 
 He was reticent about his cases, but always 
 gave a civil answer when questioned. Some 
 women seemed to think he could work mir- 
 acles ; but when he lost a patient they never 
 blamed him. 
 
 One of them, the wife of a farmer just out- 
 side the village, rushed after him one day, 
 shouting at the top of her voice, — 
 
 "Is it true, doctor ? is it true ?" She had 
 heard that he had put back the brains of a 
 man, which had been spilled, and that the 
 patient was quite well again. The old doctor 
 silently beamed on her with his eloquent smile 
 and drove on. The woman said, " It beat all 
 nater;" but from that day she believed the 
 story. 
 
 The village children ate all sorts of wild 
 things because, they said, if they were poi- 
 soned the doctor could cure them ; and every 
 one of them firmly believed that anything torn 
 from the body could be spliced on by him. 
 No one was more amused by this homage than 
 himself. It was the natural reward of his 
 skill ; so he took no pains to abate it. It made 
 him a little proud, perhaps, but it left un- 
 
16 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 touched the sweetness of his heart. A tear 
 or a tender utterance was as natural to him as 
 a smile. When his speech was needed he pre- 
 ferred it to silence, but he might be excused 
 for the latter because he made it more elo- 
 quent than many men's words. He was held 
 up by mothers as an example to their sons, 
 but no boy ever expected to grow up to be like 
 the great doctor of East Eoad. When he died 
 the whole town mourned him. It was as if a 
 great prop had been taken away from every 
 citizen. 
 
 The practice of a country doctor was hard, 
 taking him over rough roads, by day and by 
 night, in all sorts of weather. He carried his 
 medicines with him, in a small trunk or a pair 
 of saddle-bags packed full of vials. To get 
 a peep at these was a delight to children ; and 
 I remember with what awe I used to watch 
 the great East Eoad doctor when he tapped 
 mysterious powders out of his vials upon bits 
 of paper. I can see him now, mixing two 
 kinds, gray and white, slowly grinding them 
 together with the point of his penknife. He 
 would drop paregoric and other liquids for the 
 women whose hands trembled, and they used 
 to bring their old medicine-bottles to him for 
 inspection. He tried most of these, after 
 shaking, by touching the ends of their corks 
 
EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 17 
 
 to his tongue, and was quite sure to condemn 
 them by a shake of his head. The emptied 
 bottles were washed and hung up by strings, 
 to be used when wanted. Physicians in regu- 
 har practice were called " calomel doctors" by 
 the more ignorant farmers' Avives, who seemed 
 to think that calomel or " marc'ry" was the 
 basis of their practice. Such women had an 
 affinity for quacks, and went about, with tlieir 
 aprons full of herbs, treating cases for nothing. 
 They liked to save the expense of a doctor, 
 and seemed to think that any kind of medicine 
 would do for a sick person. One at East 
 Road gave to her husband, who was in sore 
 straits, a dose of saltpetre when she should 
 have given salts. The result was a funeral a 
 few days after. A mother at Whitefield Cor- 
 ner mistook laudanum for paregoric and made 
 an angel out of a twin-baby. 
 
 As a class the doctors were long lived, and, 
 from much solitary driving, were apt to be 
 thoughtful men. There was one in the next 
 town to East Road whose cheeks were tanned 
 like leather by exposure. He had a great deal 
 of night-practice, for he was said to have ex- 
 cellent judgment with children, and mothers 
 had a way of waiting until after dark before 
 they called the doctor. His horse knew every 
 inch of the highway, and so he often slept as 
 
18 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 he drove. He was just the opposite of the 
 great East Road doctor in this, — that when he 
 got started at talking he never seemed to know 
 how to stop. He laughed very loud at what 
 he called " whims" in women, and once gave 
 bread-pills to a person who was " spleeny." 
 He was looked upon as a '' first-class doctor," 
 but was a little '' peculiar," which was owing, 
 he himself said, to the fact that his father and 
 mother were cousins. 
 
 Just outside of East Road ran a brook for 
 some distance along the roadside, — a mild 
 babbler in summer; tongue-tied in winter; 
 but, when swollen by spring and autumn 
 rains, it became a torrent, tearing wildly at 
 its banks. On the farther side of this brook, 
 close by a wood of pines, stood a small cot- 
 tage, reached from the highway by a bridge. 
 Strangely enough, in a bleak climate, it was 
 plastered outside as well as in, and had been 
 much peeled by frost. In it lived a woman 
 by the name of Mary Jack, with two young 
 daughters. She had been a "hired girl" of 
 my grandmother's, so I one day went to visit 
 her. 
 
 She was a queer-looking woman, very dark, 
 with black streaks under her eyes, and blacker, 
 arching eyebrows, so that she seemed to have 
 on spectacles. One of the little girls looked 
 
^^^T' ROAD AND WHITE FIELD CORNER. 19 
 
 just like her, and the other was light com- 
 plexionecl, with long yellow curls. She was 
 quite pretty, and Mrs. Jack said she " favored 
 her father." I had been told that Mr. Jack 
 w^as humpbacked and had run away, and that 
 Mrs. Jack was always expecting him. 
 
 There was a nice little tea, with blackberries 
 picked by the Jack girls from the roadside, 
 and custards baked in cups. You could see 
 the pine-trees through cracks in the wall ; but 
 Mrs. Jack said she stuffed these cracks with 
 rags in winter, when she moved into the south 
 room, which was much warmer. From where 
 I sat the bridge, with its slanting shadows un- 
 derneath, the gliding brook, the unthrifty but 
 beautiful wildness of its low-lying shores, were 
 framed in the doorway like a picture. I 
 asked Mrs. Jack why the bridge had been 
 built so high up, and she said, " Bless you, 
 child ! that ain't high up at all ; for when a 
 freshet comes, if I didn't lift the planks, they'd 
 all be carried off." 
 
 " Lift the planks ?" 
 
 "Why, yes. When the waters get 'most 
 up to the bottom of the bridge, I begin at 
 t'other side and take up one at a time until 
 I've fetched 'em all in. The waters are de- 
 ceitful. They're as swift as a mill-race in 
 spring, and come 'most up to the door. Once, 
 
20 OLDTIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 in an awful wet season, they ran into the 
 house.'' 
 
 I waded under the hridge with the two 
 little girls, and wandered about the woods 
 and meadow-land with them. I remember 
 how, as the day waned, the place began to 
 seem weird to me, with its portable bridge 
 and Mrs. Jack looking at me from her spec- 
 tacled eyes. In the gloaming, from the 
 brookside, came the croaking of frogs, and 
 a whippoorwill set up a tooting in the heart 
 of the wood. Mrs. Jack kept telling me to 
 make myself at home ; but, somehow, I could 
 not feel at home, and Avas very glad when I 
 saw my grandfather's man coming for me over 
 the brido-e. 
 
 I wish I could show you that street of 
 houses — East Road — -just as it was when I 
 knew it, Avith its front-yards full of lilacs and 
 rosebushes and clumps of lilies and peonies. 
 I remember that a bunch of Aaron's-rod grew 
 close by the doctor's doorstep, and that tansy 
 used to push its blossoms, through his garden 
 fence, into the front-yard. I wish you could 
 see his doorway just as it looked when he 
 was the great surgeon sought for from far 
 and near. It opened into a square entry, 
 with a mahogany table standing against its 
 inner wall. On either side of this entry was 
 
EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 21 
 
 a large room, with windows half darkened by 
 vines, and wall seats under them deliciously 
 cool and restful-looking. 
 
 East Road used to be lively with the con- 
 stant passing of wagons and teams. Now the 
 sluggish life of the little village hardly indents 
 its verdure, and the wide street is grass-grown 
 between its ruts. There is a pathetic air of 
 decay about it. I never knew a place which 
 had, if one may so speak, such a human ex- 
 pression. I suppose it is because I lived into 
 it in childhood. The wise old doctor haunts 
 it. So do they all wlio, known by me, dwelt 
 in the square, roomy houses. 
 
 Where the doctor used to sit in summer 
 evenings, revered by the village children, is 
 a weather-cracked door, shut close, its brass 
 knocker looking as if unscoured for forty 
 years. Several of the largest houses are no 
 longer lived in. These dying homes touch 
 me. I feel like crying out to them to stay 
 where they arc, and to give back to me in 
 reality what I give to them in memory. 
 
 The peace and pathos and beauty of this 
 shaded, half-deserted street suggest that heav- 
 enly quiet for which we all long. You need 
 not try to find the village on a map. Three 
 brothers, who built three of its best houses, 
 gave to it their own name. It is as often 
 
22 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 called B 's Corner as East Road; but I 
 
 like the name of East Eoad better. A rail- 
 road winds along its horizon with a flying 
 mist-wreath of smoke. I trust this will never 
 invade East Road, whose avenue of trees, 
 stretching along a high ridge of land, may 
 be seen from afar. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 THE STAGE-COACH. 
 
 Two stage-coaches ran through Whitefickl 
 Corner from Dexter to East Road, one going 
 up, while the other went down. The stage- 
 coach was painted just the colors of a bumble- 
 hee, in alternate yellow and black. It w^as 
 lined with leather, grown slippery by use, and 
 on both sides, close to its top, were printed in 
 lar^e letters the names of the towns through 
 which it passed : " Whitefield, Sanapee, Blake's 
 Corner, &c."; '' &c." meaning all the towns 
 between Blake's Corner and East Road. 
 
 It was a lumbering vehicle, swaying upon 
 broad springs and draw^n by six horses, with 
 seats for nine persons inside and more on top. 
 Its rumbling was heard from afar, and it was 
 heralded by a cloud of dust. All the loafers 
 used to swarm about the tavern-door to see its 
 leaders come up with a dash. 
 
 There were two taverns at Whitefield Cor- 
 ner. One, with three great trees before it, had 
 a comfortable, homelike look. The other was 
 
 23 
 
24 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 bare, with only a lilac in front. The former 
 was kept by a widow, the latter by a very fat 
 man. Both set a good table, and the woman 
 took one of the stages to dine and the man 
 the other. Each tavern had a sign. One of 
 these, with a stage and four horses painted on 
 it, hung from one of the trees before the house 
 kept by the woman. The other, quite plain, 
 swung from a post painted green. The tavern 
 with the trees was the most genteel. It had a 
 cosey parlor, with a sofa and prints, and shells 
 on its mantel, and its best chamber had fringe 
 to its curtains, and a stove. It took the judges 
 and lawyers at court-time, and was a quiet 
 house for women and children. The other 
 was a putting-up place for jDcddlers and team- 
 sters. Each had a bar : the woman's was in 
 a closet out of sight; the man's, filled with 
 boxes and bottles, took up one corner of a 
 room. Both taverns were remarkably clean. 
 
 The peddlers were mostly sellers of tin, 
 for which they were paid in rags and dried 
 apples, and sometimes in old pewter and iron. 
 Their carts, "fitted up" with hooks and shelves 
 inside, the heavier wares being garnished with 
 rattles and whistles, were the delight of young 
 children, who crowded around the farmers' 
 wives when they were what was called '' dick- 
 ering" with a peddler. The pans of the latter 
 
THE STAGE-COACH. 25 
 
 had very thin bottoms, and he was said to 
 "cheat" at his weighing; hut the peddler al- 
 ways declared that there were two sides to a 
 stor}^, and that the women played tricks with 
 their rags. It took a long time for the two 
 parties to make a bargain, with much talk, 
 which Farmer Lathem called "jabber." Mean- 
 while, they made a quaint picture at a back 
 door, — the peddler with steelyards weighing his 
 rags and finding his mark with his finger, 
 knowing that he was closely eyed by the 
 women. The latter took great pride in new 
 tin, and never failed to be amazed that so much 
 brightness could be bought with old rags. 
 
 The teamsters were apt to be " coarse- 
 grained" and frequented taverns of their own, 
 which were called " putting-up places," to dis- 
 tinguish them from those of a higher class. 
 Once the trafiic now given to railroads was 
 carried on by teams, which kept the highways 
 hard-trodden and lively. They were laden 
 with all kinds of produce fit for commerce and 
 barter, and their drivers, like those of the 
 stages, were hardened to any stress of weather. 
 A team was just tlie opposite of the stage- 
 coach. There was nothing merry about it. 
 It slowly ground its way along, creaking and 
 groaning, unhastened by its driver's never- 
 ceasing " G'lang!" Still, the team was peculiar 
 
 3 
 
26 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 to the country, — an expression of its toilsome 
 life, — and kept grass from growing in the high- 
 ways. It gave motion — sluggish to be sure, but 
 motion — from the moment it crawled over the 
 edge of the horizon until some child who had 
 been watching it cried out, " It's only a team." 
 
 The stage-driver who put up at the woman's 
 tavern, Moses by name, was better-natured 
 than the other, but each was kind to his 
 horses and had a face as red as a beet. With 
 what a rush and dust they drove up to the 
 tavern-doors and flung down their reins, tied 
 up in a knot ! (These reins were never called 
 " ribbons," for they were made of stout ox- 
 hide.) Then they threw out the mail-bags 
 and jumped from their boxes w^ith a bound. 
 The hostler rushed out from the stable and the 
 barkeeper back to his bottles. There was a 
 rattling of dishes and a hurrying and scurry- 
 ing both indoors and out ; the maid in the 
 kitchen was sharp with her words and the 
 landlady looked terribly w^orried, for the stage- 
 folks were getting their dinners. 
 
 While the old passengers w^ere eating new 
 ones stole the " back seat," and more trunks 
 were strapped on behind. All disputes about 
 places were settled b}^ the driver, Avho gave the 
 best to old ladies and such women as could 
 never " ride backwards." 
 
THE S TA GE- CO A CIl. 
 
 Moses was a regular old Trojan, driving 
 through all sorts of weather. Sometimes his 
 wheels were hub-deep in mud, sometimes as 
 deep in water. He could find his way by night 
 as well as by day, and it was fun for him to 
 break through a snow-drift with his leaders. 
 How old he was nobody knew. He might be 
 all the way from forty to sixty. His driving 
 would have been reckless in a city, but he 
 knew every inch of his country route like 
 a book, and where it was safe to " make time." 
 He flew down hills at a furious rate, and 
 cracked his whip and ploughed up the dust 
 with a smother. His whip had a snapper in 
 the shape of a tassel, which when he flung it 
 out cracked like a pistol, reaching to the heads 
 of his leaders. His stage and his harness were 
 so strong, and his hand so firm and skilful, 
 that an accident seldom happened. Sometimes 
 a horse " baulked," but this only belated the 
 tavern dinner. Once, when I was aboard, 
 something in the stage " gave away" just five 
 miles from Whitefield Corner. Then Moses 
 put us all out by the roadside with our trunks 
 and bandboxes and bundles, and he drove ofi:" 
 to get the thing mended. I remeijiber how 
 cruel he seemed when his mishap had made 
 him deaf as a driver. For neither money nor 
 coaxing would he take a single passenger with 
 
28 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 him, though one man had pressing business at 
 Sanapee and a young girl expected to meet her 
 lover at Blake's Corner. She walked on ahead 
 and got there in season ; but the man foolishly 
 waited for the stage, and lost, he said, " a good 
 chance for a bargain." 
 
 Moses chewed tobacco and spit to the wind- 
 ward and swore in bad weather, but when 
 everything ran smoothly he was the politest 
 man in the world to ladies. 
 
 The stage was a great place for gossip, and 
 in it people had to be cautious as to what they 
 said. I knew the village of Whiteiield Corner 
 to be stirred up like a hornets' nest by the 
 prattle of a little child to a mild-eyed inquis- 
 itive stranger. The gist of her talk was that 
 a certain woman was a liar ; and this liar was 
 only an aunt to the stranger ! 
 
 In bright da3'S the seats on top were in de- 
 mand for men, but they were apt to make 
 children giddy. The best seat of all was by 
 the driver. Moses had been with many peo- 
 ple, and was very observing. He had a sharp 
 wit of his own, and a quaint way of telling 
 stories. You would hear him call out in a 
 cheery voice, " There is room for one more by 
 me right here," and he sometimes found it 
 handy to have a seat-mate to hold his reins. 
 
 Village children used to watch for the stixge, 
 
THE STAGE-COACH. 29 
 
 and were mucli excited when it stopped at 
 their door. The one from the north was first 
 seen like a speck where the white line of a 
 road met the edge of the sky. The one from 
 the south, hidden by trees, first made itself 
 known by its rumbling. To ride in the stage 
 was considered a luxury, but to be stage-sick 
 was as bad as a sickness at sea. 
 
 The vehicles in winter went upon runners, 
 and were shut up close with curtains of woollen. 
 Overturns in these were not uncommon, but 
 seldom ainounted to more than a snow-plunge 
 and a little bruising. Trunks were called 
 baggage. Bandboxes were tossed upon the 
 top; and, as these were mostly of paper, 
 they had, in wet weather, to be covered 
 with a piece of tarpaulin. Bottles and bundles 
 were tucked beneath the seat of the driver, 
 and hard things were put under his feet. 
 His pockets were crammed, and there seemed 
 to be no end to his personal carryings. He 
 was as safe with a secret as the mail, and 
 winked when he took and gave small packages. 
 He grew a little careless with age, and lost some 
 of his custom. Once he carried a bottle of 
 leeches to Sanapee which ought to have been 
 left at Whiteiield Corner. They were wanted 
 for a man who afterwards died, — not, it is to 
 be hoped, for lack of the leeches. Again, he 
 
30 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 misplaced a box of trout, which were not at 
 all improved by keeping. He forgot a bonnet 
 made for a bride, who vainly expected its 
 coming. 
 
 ]S'o wonder that taverns were enticing at 
 stage-time ; that loafers sat in rows on wooden 
 benches before them ; that storekeepers stood 
 in doorways and women came to window^s 
 when Moses whirled up cracking his whip 
 at his leaders. Even farmers stopped from 
 work in their fields when boys called out, 
 " The stage is coming I" The cobbler, whose 
 shop, paved in front with scraps of leather, 
 was next to the woman's tavern, always came 
 to his door with a shoe in one hand and a 
 last in the other. 
 
 Yes, a rare man was Moses, undismayed 
 by any kind of errand or weather. When 
 other people were hugging their fires, he 
 kept himself warm by beating his breast 
 with his arms. What the women failed to 
 find in the stores of Sanapee, Whitefield, and 
 Blake's Corner, he got for them in the larger 
 town of Dexter. He never was vexed by a 
 bandbox or failed to find room for a trunk. 
 He helped the mothers with their babies as if 
 he had been a born nurse, and nothing could 
 keep him from laughing but the stifiening of 
 his muscles by frost. 
 
THE STAGE-COACH. 31 
 
 They are all gone now, — the taverns, tlie 
 loafers, and the cobhler. So, also, are the 
 drivers, with their leaders. Grass grows 
 where a cloud of dust once stretched out 
 behind them. East Road, as I have told 
 you, is quite deserted ; but at Whitefield and 
 Blake's Corner the rumble of the steam-cars 
 is far louder and longer than the oldtime 
 rumble of the stages. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 DEAR OLD FOLKS. 
 
 My grandmother died twenty years ago at 
 East Road, having lived in this sinful world 
 ninety-two years. From her appearance at that 
 time, one might have supposed that she would 
 live to be more than a hundred, so erect, so 
 well preserved, so bright, was she, this aged 
 woman, who had resolutely held her own al- 
 most through her second half-centuiy. I see 
 exactly how she looked, the very garments she 
 w^ore, the ways peculiar to herself, her whole 
 aspect radiant with an immortal youth. She 
 may not have been a very learned woman, — I 
 dare say she was not ; but in sweetness of speech 
 and in personal magnetism ni}^ childhood never 
 saw her equal. At fifty, I have been told, she 
 was the handsomest woman in her town ; at 
 sixty the hand of time had but lightly caressed 
 her; and at eighty she seemed in the full splen- 
 dor of a ripe old age. When she came to die 
 it was like the sudden going out of a spent 
 candle. She slept through the last night of her 
 
 32 
 
DEAR OLD FOLKS. 33 
 
 long and useful life as peacefully as a little 
 child, and waked in another world. 
 
 It is to the credit of the old men and women 
 whom I kncAV in childhood that they taught 
 me a reverence for age. They came from a 
 stock out of which the feeble ones had per- 
 haps been wdnnowed by a harsh climate and 
 hard work, so that they were the best of their 
 race. They were strong and wase to the last. 
 They were charming companions for little 
 children, because they loved to tell of the 
 incidents of their simple lives. Some of them, 
 like my grandmother, were born story-tellers, 
 and twined imagery in and out their speech, 
 making pleasant objects of the commonest 
 things. There could be no sweeter picture 
 than that of the dear old creatures sitting by 
 open fires with little children listening, wide- 
 mouthed, to their riddles and innocent prattle 
 of their own young days. 
 
 My brother Benny and I believed our 
 grandmother to be the brightest of women, 
 and thought her oft-repeated stories wonder- 
 ful, though they seem simple enough now. 
 There must have been a vein of poetry in the 
 old story-teller herself which made them mar- 
 vellous to us. One, about the making of a 
 johnny-cake, comes back to me, almost word 
 for w^ord, with the fidelity of a nursery-rhyme. 
 
34 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 This is how she told it : " Wlien I was a little 
 girl, seven tj-odd years ago, I thought I would 
 bake a johnny-cake of my own. You know 
 how it is done, children. You must scald your 
 bright yellow meal with hot water and beat 
 your batter well with a spoon ; add a little salt, 
 and then spread it very smooth and thin upon 
 your tin. Tilt the tin before the open fire, and 
 when your cake has slightly browned upon one 
 side turn the other side to the fire, that both 
 may be firm and crisp. Now, children," she 
 always said, " if you have made and baked that 
 cake right, all the golden glory of the corn 
 will be between those two crusts, and it will 
 go out to meet the butter, and the butter will 
 embrace it, and both will melt in your mouth, 
 sweet, healthful, delicious." Here, after a little 
 pause, she would take up her story again : " To 
 begin where I left off* : I thought I would bake 
 a cake of my own : so I mixed my batter and 
 took it slyly behind the shed, where it might 
 bake unseen. An open fire was of no use out 
 of doors, and it had taken me one whole day 
 to get an oven ready. Six well-shaped flat 
 stones were not easily found, — four for the sides 
 and top, one for the bottom, and another for 
 the door. A narrow gap, made by slipping 
 back the top stone, gave a draft, and the thing 
 was done. Then came the gathering of fuel 
 
DEAR OH) FOLKS. 35 
 
 and the sly kindling of the fire ; for there were 
 no matches in tliosc days, and a coal was to be 
 filched from the kitchen fireplace." 
 
 Her horror at seeing smoke curling above 
 the shed and her being found out were vividly 
 told. I^evertheless she was left to heat her 
 oven, and she put in her cake and waited for 
 it to bake. At this point she always wondered 
 that her calico tier had not caught fire, and 
 that, instead of being our loving old grand- 
 mother, she had not been burnt to a cinder. 
 The tale o-rew livelier as the cake went on 
 bakins;. She looked into the oven several 
 times. It was "doing beautifully;" it was 
 '' almost done." Then her mother called to 
 her, — 
 
 "Eleanor, go up to E'eighbor Merrill's as 
 quick as you can, and borrow a piece of ren- 
 net." She hated to go and leave the cake, 
 but go she must ; and " it did seem," she al- 
 ways said, " as if Mrs. Merrill would never let 
 me ofi*. 
 
 " When I got home I went straight to my 
 oven, and what do you suppose ? Well, if you 
 will believe it, a hog had come along and was 
 eating my cake as fast as he could !" 
 
 Here Benny always said " Oh !" and I said 
 " Oh !" and we were both very sorry that a hog 
 had eaten up our grandmother's golden glory. 
 
36 OLDTIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 We could never quite understand how the 
 hog could root down the rocks if they were 
 hot. We always wanted to ask our grand- 
 mother if he waited for them to cool, but 
 were a little in awe of her : she looked so se- 
 rene and so far off, with her beautiful, age- 
 crowned head, and her composure, elegant and 
 rare. 
 
 My dear, it was not much of a story. The 
 golden glory was not in the cake. It was in 
 the lovely old grandmother herself. Out of 
 her roj^al nature and presence zest went into 
 it, and was given to the little ones who heard it. 
 
 A tone of her voice, a turn of her head, a 
 touch of her dear old hand gave force to it. 
 It was a part of herself, and as such we always 
 hailed it with delight. Not long since I turned 
 aside, upon a journey, to visit the spot where, 
 a hundred years before, she had built the oven 
 for her golden glory. 
 
 She brought me a fine present once in 
 a great, round willow basket, and wrapped 
 about with a fine linen table-cloth of her own 
 weaving. It came eighteen miles in midwin- 
 ter, with my grandfather and grandmother, 
 who carefully packed it in straw, lest it should 
 be nipped by frost or marred by jolting. I 
 see them now as they looked when they drove 
 up to my father's door, their old heads just 
 
DEAR OLD FOLKS. 37 
 
 above the high hack of their hrown sleigh. 
 My grandfatlier wore " fringed" mittens, and 
 my grandmother a " pumpkin" hood and a 
 thick green veil. A shaggy huffalo-rohe was 
 tucked about them both, and inside of this 
 was a homespun coverlet of blue and wdiite. 
 Bells were strung by a leathern strap about 
 the horse's neck, and their far-reaching jingle 
 was heard long before the sleigh came in sight. 
 We children could tell the sound of them from 
 that of any others. The horse was a little less 
 shaggy than the robe, and his harness, made 
 for farm use, had blinders almost as large as 
 tea-plates. When he stopped he gave a sturdy 
 shake of his bells, and then hung his head in 
 that attitude of patient waiting peculiar to 
 farm-horses. 
 
 The old folks got out a little clumsily, tug- 
 ging the willow basket between them. They 
 tottered under its weight, and had to set it 
 down, even before Betsey, the maid, met them. 
 Shall I tell 3'ou what it was, — this wonderful 
 present, too heavy for the two octogenarians and 
 as much as a strong, lithe lass could well carry? 
 But first let Melissa stop her ears, — Melissa, 
 that girl who gets all her dresses from Paris, 
 with parasols and bonnets to match. It is not 
 for the like of her to hear what these dear old 
 folks brought to their grandchild in a willow 
 
38 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 basket more than forty years ago. All the 
 boys and girls who have trundled hoops along 
 a country highway, who have scooped up its 
 hot sand in summer days, half-wild foragers 
 of a wild landscape, — such may lend me an 
 ear and I will tell them. 
 
 It was a cheese, — a great, fat, round cheese, 
 into which had gone the cream of sixteen cows 
 (my grandmother told me) ; and when it was 
 cut Betsey declared that it was the " toothsom- 
 est cheese" she had ever tasted. 
 
 " I was not sure," the dear old lady said, 
 " whether it were better to spot it with tansy 
 or yarrow ; but your grandfather thought tansy 
 w^ould make the prettier color." 
 
 I was glad she took tansy, for that grew in 
 a corner of the sunny garden, close by a strag- 
 gling red-rose bush, under which hens bur- 
 rowed, while the yarrow was found mostl}^ by 
 the wall of the little burying-ground in the 
 " east field." It would have been like tasting 
 of the dust of one's ancestors to have eaten of 
 yarrow. As it was, it seemed almost like de- 
 vouring a part of the dear old grandmother 
 herself to partake of the cheese at all. Her 
 hand had plucked the pungent tansy and ex- 
 pressed its tinted juice. It was her skill that 
 had coaxed the tender curd from the whey 
 and moulded and pressed it until it compacted 
 
DEAR OLD FOLKS. 39 
 
 into my well-rounded present. It was the 
 quaint old pair who had taken it, when 
 drained, from its press and tugged it into the 
 safe, where for days they had carefully turned 
 it, and Avatched its bulging sides for mischiev- 
 ous cracks, while oiling and polishing its rind. 
 There was somethins^ touchino^ in this takinfi: 
 up again by these old people of a bygone task 
 out of love to a little child. 
 
 I remember their old cheese-safe. It had 
 a perfume of its own, as if wild scents had 
 been poured into it from field and pasture. 
 The room in which the cheeses were made 
 opened from the kitchen and had a fireplace, 
 with oven and boiler for rough work. Its outer 
 door was high up, without steps, and from it 
 waste waters were fluno^ into a slack-lookins: 
 rock-heap. Close by was a corn-house on 
 stilts, and a cider-press under a shed. Between 
 this shed and the house a flock of turkeys and 
 a gobbler kept up a constant march, and the 
 corn-house was alive underneath with hens. 
 
 At harvest-time the yard about the press 
 was always heaped with apples, set apart for 
 the making of cider. I see the old farm-horse, 
 hitched to a long beam, walking his patient 
 round ; rich juice trickling into a trough, and 
 the mash turning brown in the sun. Outside 
 the slied is a row of iron-hooped casks. A 
 
40 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 week later these will all be foaming at their 
 bung-holes, through which, if jou put your ear 
 close, you will hear a deep -toned, singing 
 sound, — the cider is working. ^N'ow is the time 
 to suck it with a straw, pulled from the upper 
 mow of the barn. It will gush upon your 
 tongue with a mellow, spicy tang, — this per- 
 fumed, yeasty life-blood of the apple. If you 
 choose to draw it, with loss, from the spigot, 
 and hold it, in a tumbler, up to the sun, j^ou 
 will see it full of tiny bubbles, which fly after 
 each other with a hum. Later the bungs will 
 be driven in, with a fringe of husks around 
 them, and the casks will be planted in a row 
 against the cellar-wall. In midwinter, when 
 the humming inside of them has stopped, they 
 will give out a silent, thin, sour drink. This 
 is called '• hard cider." 
 
 Close behind the cider - press were two 
 roomy old barns. These had for a background 
 a wooded mountain, up to the base of which 
 stretched my grandfather's broad acres of 
 field and woodland and pasture. ISText to the 
 mountain was a meadow, always wet and full of 
 pitfalls. The men-folks said that it was boggy, 
 and had no sound bottom. One spot in par- 
 ticular they let entirely alone. This held a 
 large puddle of half-stagnant water, which 
 never dried up, even in the longest drouth. 
 
DEAR OLD FOLKS. 41 
 
 Cows gave this puddle a wide berth, and the 
 bhick circle of their hoof-marks was far from 
 its outermost edge. 
 
 When the cheese had been cut and tasted, 
 and greatly praised, my grandmother telling 
 again that into it had gone the cream of six- 
 teen cows, she remarked, '' One of the cows 
 will never help make another cheese. She got 
 mired last fall." 
 
 " Got mired !" Benny looked at me and I 
 looked at Benny. Here was a mystery. "Oh, 
 tell us all about it !" we both cried; and the dear 
 old woman sat down, and we sat down in front 
 of her and folded our hands, and she began : 
 
 '' One night, late last fall, the cows came up 
 as usual to the pasture-bars, lowing to be let 
 out. The hired man counted them as they 
 jumped over the lower bar. There were only 
 fifteen of them. One was missing,— Brindle, 
 the youngest and best of the lot. It was her 
 cream that gave your cheese its soft, golden 
 tint. The hired man hunted over the pasture 
 in vain. Then he crossed into the woodland, 
 calling ^Mooly! Mooly!' as he went. He 
 thought the creature might have broken into 
 the highway; but there was no gap in the 
 fence, and she certainly was not in the pound. 
 Just as he was giving up in despair, out from 
 the meadow came a faint sound, almost like a 
 
 4 
 
42 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 human wail. He went towards it as far as he 
 dared, up to the very edge of the bog, where, 
 close to the stagnant water, what should he 
 see but Brindle, neck-deep in mud !" 
 
 Here our grandmother stopped. There was 
 a little flutter of the lace about her throat. 
 We thought there was a tear in her eye ; but 
 she brushed her hand ever so lightly across 
 her face, and it was gone. 
 
 Little Benny, who had the tenderest heart 
 of any mortal, tried to ask, "Did she get 
 out?" but he could only utter a w^ord, and I' 
 had to finish his question for him. 
 
 "ISTo," said my grandmother; "the man 
 stayed and watched her until nothing was 
 left but her horns, and in the morning they 
 too had gone out of sight. She could not 
 have been gotten out, for the bog was quite as 
 unsafe for man as beast. The wonder was 
 how she came to go there at all, so fully had 
 the spot always been shunned by herds. She 
 might have been driven in by a prowling dog. 
 Even "Watch, who had grown gray in our 
 service, was not above suspicion." 
 
 A trifle formal was my grandmother in her 
 story-telling; but her style became her, — this 
 dear old woman, \\\\o loved everything that 
 belonged to her farm. 
 
 When her story was done, Benny and I 
 
DEAR OLD FOLKS. 43 
 
 pitied her, because she had lost the golden 
 tinge to her cheeses when Brindle got mired 
 in the hole without a bottom. 
 
 Meanwhile the delightful pair, the grand- 
 father and grandmother, sat by the open fire 
 that night, she in her stiff black silk, with 
 her face framed in a frill of lace ; he patri- 
 archal of aspect; both cast in radiant high 
 light upon a shadowy background of the 
 dim old room. 
 
 Tlie}^ went home the next day, leaving 
 the basket and cheese behind them. The 
 cheese melted quickly away. The basket, 
 much worn at its handles and brittle to 
 touch, is still in being. Poor old thing ! It 
 is more than forty years old. JMo matter; so 
 long as it lasts at all, it can never be so old, 
 or so broken, that it will not at sight of it 
 call up tlie picture of two dear old creatures 
 tugging a great cheese, made from the cream 
 of sixteen cows, as a present to a little child. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 WAYSIDE THINGS. 
 
 The pound, in which my grandfather's 
 " hired man" vainly sought for the lost cow, 
 was half a mile from East Road. 
 
 A pound was apt to be a scary place, 
 generally quite far from any house. There 
 is one now in most, if not all, !N"ew England 
 towns. In it animals found trespassing are 
 shut up ; also such as have strayed away 
 from their owners, or are dangerously loose 
 upon the highway. Here they are kept 
 and tended until claimed, and their damages 
 paid. It was a reproach to a farmer to have 
 an animal put in the pound, and the im- 
 pounding of one was often the occasion of 
 much ill-feeling. 
 
 There was a pound half a mile outside of 
 the village where I was born. Its walls were 
 thick and high, and topped by huge beams, 
 mortised at their ends. Its gate was like the 
 door of a prison for strength, and was fast- 
 ened by a huge padlock. Many a time have 
 
 44 
 
WAYSfDE THINGS. 45 
 
 I seen cows and horses in it browsing its 
 meagre grass, and looking hopelessly through 
 the bars of its gate. 
 
 Later this pound fell into disuse. Its beams 
 rotted and tumbled from their sockets over 
 the wall. The gate got unhinged. Some- 
 body stole the padlock. Blackberry and su- 
 mach bushes filled the place ; and nothing but 
 ghosts were supposed to dwell in it. 
 
 Children seemed to think something dread- 
 ful was always lurking in this pound. It was 
 a favorite haunt of snakes; and a drunken 
 man, who lived just outside of the village, 
 used to get sober behind its walls. Once a 
 little dog, cut by a scythe, crawled in amongst 
 its bushes and cried one whole day. Just be- 
 cause he was in the pound, the children said 
 he was mad; and he would have starved to 
 death had it not been for a traveller. A crazy 
 w^oman slept in it one night, and when she left 
 it had one more reproach than before. It was 
 as if an ogre had cast a spell over the spot. 
 
 Yet, after all, the ghostly old pound entered 
 pleasantly into the lives of the children. It 
 was a way-mark for them. They measured the 
 distance of fields and woods and pastures from 
 it. They seldom went into it; yet, when it 
 was gone, they greatly missed it. As years 
 went by, with no use for it, the town let it 
 
46 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 alone. Farmers filched its rocks, one by one, 
 to splice into their own walls ; and, before any- 
 body seemed to know that it was going, the 
 old pound was wiped from the landscape. 
 
 Just beyond this pound was a guideboard. 
 Guideboards used to stand at almost every 
 meeting of roads in l^ew England. They are 
 less frequent since railroads came into use, 
 but still thrust out their friendly arms on all 
 chief highways of travel. Once they were 
 never left to get out of repair. ]^ow you find 
 them at the angles of by-roads, split and 
 one-sided, or lying flat by the w^ay. 
 
 I remember with what interest I used, when 
 travelling, to study their inscriptions. Each 
 board had a black hand, with a long, black 
 finger, pointing towards the towns named. 
 They were friendly things, with a half-human 
 look. At dusk, in the sandy, sparsely-wooded 
 huckleberry plains which lay between "White- 
 field Corner and East Road, guideboards 
 loomed up to travellers like gaunt creatures. 
 One, at the meeting of four roads in these 
 woods, had four arms full of script, for these 
 highways were so alike that only stage-drivers 
 and frequent passers could tell whither each 
 went. Strangers had to walk around this 
 guideboard to read all of its inscriptions. It 
 was only a few miles from East Road, and it 
 
WAYS WE THINGS. 47 
 
 was refreshing, upon a sudden turn in a weary 
 journey, to be told so. 
 
 The one above the pound at Whitelield has 
 for many years ceased to be ; but I behokl it, 
 as if it were but yesterday, with its post 
 painted red, its two white boards set at right 
 angles, bound with black, and lettered in bold 
 script, — 
 
 Sanapee 10 miles. 
 Boxford 2 " 
 
 This guidcboard had such a bad reputation 
 that when a man living near it was supposed 
 to be untruthful, it was often said that he 
 "lied like the guidcboard to Sanapee," and 
 women in its neighborhood laughed when 
 they saw strangers stopping to read it. In 
 just such simple ways as these are the lives 
 of country people linked with the objects 
 about them. 
 
 ''Boxford 2 miles." You had to go to 
 Boxford to get to Red Mountain. Red 
 Mountain is not down on the map, but it is 
 set into a landscape like a jewel in a queen's 
 crown. To reach it you had to drive through 
 the little village of Boxford; then several 
 miles along a rugged road to a pair of bars, 
 which let you into a field. At the far end of 
 this field, up the side of the mountain, was a 
 
48 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 house with a barn, where a farmer's wife told 
 you that you might ^'put up" your horse; 
 and then some such dialogue as this took 
 place : 
 
 " Hast thee come far?" 
 
 "From Whitefield Corner." 
 
 " Thee must be tired. Would thee like to 
 go into the dairy and get a glass of milk ?" 
 
 " I'm sorry to trouble you." 
 
 " It's no trouble at all." 
 
 As straight as an arrow was this aged 
 Quakeress, and her attire was without crease 
 or stain. It was very simple, — a muslin cap, 
 a white kerchief, crossed upon her breast, and 
 a plain gown, quite covered by a long, broad 
 apron of homespun check. 
 
 She was proud of her dairy, which was 
 faced with stone, and cut in two by a stream 
 of coolest spring water. Over this she kept 
 her milk in rows of shining pans. The 
 stream was walled in like a mill-race, and 
 glided under the pans with a swift and noise- 
 less motion. 
 
 Everything about the house and farm had a 
 quaint flavor. There were two daughters, 
 grown up into prim Quakeresses, wearing 
 aprons and kerchiefs like their mother. Ad- 
 oniram, the son, was a silent young man, 
 talking mostl}' by signs. The Boxford girk 
 
WAYSIDE THINGS. 49 
 
 said he was " as grum as one of his grand- 
 father's bears." 
 
 This grandfather came to the mountain 
 when it was dense with a forest. On it he 
 killed two hears, with their cubs ; and, until 
 he could do better, lived in their den. Hence 
 he was called Bear Manson ever after. 
 
 lie cleared a farm, built a log house, and 
 married a wife from Boxford. ]^ext he raised 
 the framework of this home of which I am 
 'telling you; and, by degrees, finished and 
 furnished it. Its timbers and boards were 
 sawed at a mill just outside of Boxford. 
 The men of that village went up to the 
 raising, and the mountain echoed with the 
 sound of their axes and hammers. Bear 
 Manson gave them a good supper; and one 
 of them got so mellow with cider that he 
 lost his way, and wandered all night on the 
 mountain. 
 
 Adoniram liked to show the bears' den, 
 where one saw the smoke-stains of the old 
 man's fires, and wondered how he could live 
 in it at all. Just by the den began the path 
 to the crown of the mountain. It was well 
 beaten, and, for half the way up, shaded by 
 trees. I am told that it is there still. 
 
 On the top of Eed Mountain is one of the 
 rarest of views. Many visitors lunch there, 
 
50 OLD TIME CHI LB LIFE. 
 
 and they are always sorry to come down. ^ It 
 is an enticing place, and tliey are loath to leave 
 the house on the green slope, with its dairy, 
 its gliding stream, its bears' den, and the story 
 of the sturdy old man who lived in it. 
 
 The Boxford and Whitefield Corner people 
 to this day declare that old Bear Manson was 
 " close" ; that he cheated in the measure of 
 his wood, and swelled his corn over his spring 
 before he sold it, and put tallow in his bees- 
 wax, and w^as the " trickiest of all old men." 
 
 Listen only to the mountain, wdiich tells 3'ou 
 that old Bear Manson was a brave soldier, 
 who fouo^ht ao-ainst beasts and trees and 
 rocks, and conquered a home, — this home, 
 seen from Whitefield and Sanapee and Box- 
 ford, on its sloping background of green. 
 
 Here he drank the purest of water, and 
 breathed the sweetest of air. He lived long ; 
 and the work and story of his life make 
 pleasanter every child's trip to Ked Moun- 
 tain. 
 
CHAPTER y. 
 
 WEST ROAD. 
 
 When the early snows of winter had hard- 
 ened into good sleighing my grandfather and 
 grandmother used to make ready for their 
 yearly visiting. My grandmother began by 
 doing up her laces, — her favorite diversion. 
 Then she plaited them into caps and frills, as 
 tasteful and becoming as if made by any mil- 
 liner. 
 
 Just imagine this dear old lady, who was 
 born one hundred and twelve years ago, toss- 
 ing laces into coquettish shapes to please the 
 eyes of men and women of a bygone age. 
 Does it not seem almost like a fairy tale, this 
 snatching from the clutches of the past such 
 filmy things as seem to be only the portion 
 of to-day ? 
 
 I have a double cape of real thread, yellow 
 and rare, which used to be " clear-starched" 
 by this proud old lady. It was a dainty pro- 
 cess. She stroked and caressed the capes as if 
 they had been living things, and held them up 
 
 61 
 
52 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 to the sun that she might show off their deli- 
 cate tracery. 
 
 " These will be yours some day," she would 
 say. '' They are to be worn together, and are of 
 very fine lace. You must always have one point 
 in the back, one upon either shoulder, and pin 
 the others down in front. You will be likely 
 to tell, w^hen people admire them, that they 
 once belonged to your grandmother." 
 
 Dear, deluded old dreamer ! She might as 
 well have sent her name down upon a cobweb. 
 Here they are, the double capes, wdth four 
 jagged rents in them, each equidistant from 
 that point in the back. Without the rents, I 
 have been told, they would be w^ortli many 
 times their weight in gold. I am sure they are 
 worth that to me to-day, because of the fingers 
 that marred them, and because of the woman 
 that wore them. 
 
 " Who tore the capes ?" IS^ot the child who 
 saw them " clear-starched" by the open fire, 
 but another, later born, to whom they were to 
 fall by inheritance. She had never been taught 
 to reverence them. ]^o old lady had " clear- 
 starched" them for her, and held them up to 
 the sun, and stretched out their intricate pat- 
 tern and put life into them. To her they were 
 only old-fashioned, yellow crumpled things, 
 found in the corner of a chest of drawers, 
 
WEST ROAD. 53 
 
 where she had no business to he rummaging. 
 The ghost of no ohl grandmother came to tell 
 her of their value. 
 
 Besides she had a doll, — a doll stuffed with 
 sawdust, Avliich had never worn lace at all, 
 and for which the yellow capes were quite good 
 enough. So she drew them up in the neck 
 with a string and tried them on. Singularly 
 enough, she placed them just as my grand- 
 mother had said, " with one point behind, one 
 down either shoulder, and the others in front." 
 To keep them straight she had to thrust the 
 wooden arms of the doll through the side- 
 points, and then her robe was finished. You 
 think the capes are spoiled, do you? I do not, 
 for the child who made the holes is dead. Did 
 you ever know any kind of a garment to be 
 valued less because it had been used and 
 marred b}- a child who was dead ? 
 
 " "We are going to West Road to-day, and 
 you must be a good child while we are gone," 
 said my grandmother to me one w^inter's morn- 
 ing, so long ago that I hold my breath when I 
 think of it. 
 
 " You must be a good child while we are 
 gone." Why did she not say. And you may 
 go with us ? I asked myself the question 
 many times that day, for it was one of the 
 sharpest griefs of my childhood, the driving 
 
54 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 away from the farm-house of the two old folks, 
 leaving me, their child-visitor, behind. 
 
 All the morning they had been busy as bees 
 with their "fixing off," although it was only 
 five miles to West Road. How splendid they 
 both looked to me, — my grandmother in black 
 silk, my grandfather in a blue coat spangled 
 with gilt buttons ! I watched the packing of 
 the pointed collars and a gay cap into a basket, 
 — a quaint basket, with covers like two flaps, 
 and handle wound with green baize. 
 
 They kissed me when they started, and 
 charged me again to be a good child. I saw 
 them drive slowly from the yard and up 
 Merrill's Hill until they seemed poised upon 
 the edge of the horizon, down which they 
 dropped out of sight, on their way to West 
 Road. 
 
 When the sound of their bells had died 
 out I turned into the lonely house with my 
 heart almost ready to break. Then and there, 
 with a vehemence which would have surprised 
 my ancestors had they beheld it, I said, " I will 
 see West Road before I die." 
 
 The old folks came back in the early even- 
 ing, their bells telling of them long before 
 they drove over the crest of Merrill's Hill. 
 Hannah, the maid, said to them that I had 
 "sulked" all day; but they were glad to see 
 
WEST ROAD. 55 
 
 me, and by their gradual speech melted my 
 mood. They had brought with them a glamour 
 from the mysterious West Road. 
 
 They went over the day's experience to- 
 gether, with a half-childish prattle. My grand- 
 mother praised the fineness of the table-linen 
 of her hostess, woven in a new pattern ; the 
 richness of her preserves ; and gave to Han- 
 nah a receipt for pickles which she had brought 
 home. My grandfather talked of a yoke ot 
 oxen of large girth, and declared that he 
 was afraid their host would stuff his horse to 
 death with oats. They were both of them 
 refreshed and pleased by their visit. 
 
 I did not forget West Road. All through 
 my childhood, whenever I saw a highway dip- 
 ping over the low-lying horizon into space I 
 thought of that village, and mentally renewed 
 my purpose to see it before I died. 
 
 By degrees the place took shape in my mind. 
 At first it was only a sunshiny spot, where aged 
 men and women, in holiday attire, sat and 
 talked about the things which most concerned 
 their simple lives. Later I built up around 
 them half a dozen square-roofed houses, stand- 
 ing at the crossing of two roads. I put a 
 blacksmith-shop near by, and a store, with a 
 lawyer's sign on the second story. Just by 
 one of the houses was a doctor's ofiice, and on 
 
56 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 a near hill a meeting-house with a long horse- 
 shed, hut without helfry or chimne3^ 
 
 This village slowl}^ arose from the gossip of 
 two old tongues. My grandfather's horse had 
 cast a shoe on his way to West Rpad, which 
 a blacksmith, Amos by name, had reset. My 
 grandmother had brought me back some 
 sugar hearts, red and white, bought, she said, 
 at West Road. They had visited at the 
 " 'Squire's," where the minister and the 
 lawyer, with their wives, drank tea with them. 
 
 When my village was built, I never added 
 to it nor took away from it, and when at last 
 I saw it, it stood, as I had pictured it, at the 
 meeting of the roads. It was reached by a 
 little turning aside from the ordinary routes of 
 travel and some hours spent in going up and 
 down the sharp hills of a Kew England toAvn. 
 
 " Is it safe to drive down this hill ?" asked 
 my fellow-traveller of a neat, comely woman, 
 who stood ironing in the door of a cottage 
 perched upon its summit. 
 
 " Yes, if your horses are stead^^ It's half a 
 mile long and steep in places." 
 
 We asked her why her husband had chosen 
 so high a perch for his house. 
 
 '' Well," she said, " it's a sightly place, and 
 Abijah always wants to look off. Eni'ly Susan 
 is just like him." 
 
WEST BO AD. 57 
 
 Then she stepped over the threshold, with 
 lier flat-iron in her left hand, and, shading her 
 eyes with her right, she slowly swept the Avhole 
 range of the horizon. It was a pleasant pan- 
 tomime. The children, she said, had gone 
 into the valley to school, and would not be 
 home till night. The '' men-folks" were 
 ploughing in a field below, whence their voices 
 could be indistinctly heard. 
 
 " Are you never lonely ?" we asked. 
 
 " It is a little dreary in winter," she replied ; 
 " but Abijah and Em'ly Susan like the sound 
 of the wind ; and, with the critters and the 
 children, we get along." 
 
 Here her flat-iron, touched by her wetted 
 finger, sizzed, and we knew that she wanted 
 us to go. 
 
 It seemed like driving out into infinite space, 
 so little of the highway was to be seen ahead ; 
 but our trusty beasts writhed their way hither 
 and thither and took us safely down. Half- 
 way from the top we came across a horse 
 hitched to a plough, feeding in a field. By 
 him, with their dinner-pail, sat two red-shirted 
 laborers, one of them with a broad white brow. 
 This doubtless was Abijah, and we felt sorry 
 that, because of the steepness of the way, we 
 could not stop and talk with this cheerful phi- 
 losopher. Before we got to the foot of the hill 
 
58 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 a babbling of childish voices reached us, and a 
 turn brought us in sight of a little red school- 
 house. It was noon, and a bevy of young 
 girls were eating their dinners before its door. 
 One of them, fairer than the rest, we took to 
 be Em'ly Susan. We turned our horses to- 
 wards them ; but they flew like fawns into the 
 neighboring wood, where we left them. 
 
 I often think of that hilltop cottage, though 
 seldom quite as I saw it. Instead, I behold 
 it in the solemn stillness of a winter's dawn, 
 with its lazily-coiling banner of white smoke, 
 and the ironer and Abijah and Em'ly Susan 
 " looking off,'' s-s was their wont, at the rosy 
 greeting to the snow-clad landscape of a new- 
 born day. 
 
 We came directly to another hill, not quite 
 so steep, but, like the last, cut off by the hori- 
 zon. We toiled up, and, upon the crest of it, 
 looked down into the ultima ihiile of so manj^ 
 childish dreams, — West Road. 
 
 Just as I had built it, with the square houses 
 at the crossing of the roads, the blacksmith- 
 shop, the store and its sign, the doctor's office, 
 and the meeting-house, — the very same vil- 
 lage where the old grandmother had talked of 
 webs and preserves and borrowed her receipt 
 so many years before ! 
 
 In the blacksmith-shop a brawny man was 
 
WEST ROAD. 59 
 
 driving nails into the shoe of a clumsy -bodied 
 white horse, to whom oats were holiday rations. 
 We asked if he had ever heard of my grand- 
 father. 
 
 He lifted his right hand, with the hammer, 
 to his forehead, as if he would brush cobwebs 
 from his brain, and said, — 
 
 " Let me see : old 'Squire A did you 
 
 mean ? Oh, yes ; I've heard my grandmother 
 say that he and his wife used to visit in the 
 great house yonder." 
 
 '' He was called " 'Squire," was he ?" 
 
 " Wall, yes. He was a justice of the peace, 
 and that made a ' 'squire' of him." 
 
 The great house was shut up, and quite gone 
 to decay. I looked through its open windows, 
 and thought I saw the very corner where my 
 grandmother sat and gossipped with the wives 
 of the lawyer and minister. 
 
 I asked the blacksmith to tell me the way to 
 the old " 'Squire's" farm. 
 
 He laid down his hammer and came to the 
 door. 
 
 " You see that road there ? Wall, just go 
 straight ahead and that'll take you right to it. 
 It's half a mile from East lioad. Don't want 
 to buy a clock, do you ?" 
 
 It stood in a corner of the little smithy, — a 
 stately timekeeper, from the outworn " great 
 
^0 OLD TIME CHFLDLIFE. 
 
 house" of West Road, — ticking patiently away 
 for the alien ears of another age. 
 
 My first impulse Avas to take and plant it on 
 a stairway in a city by the sea. Then I thought, 
 How will the aged time-teller stand being car- 
 ried out of this quiet village into the great 
 seething world beyond ? Who knows but its 
 long-used "works," slowly wearing away, will 
 get jangled and out of tune in the dissonant 
 moiling and toiling of a city ? 
 
 The clock began to strike. It had a wheezy 
 voice, but it kept going on and on as if it 
 would never stop. 
 
 " I believe the critter's bewitched," sai'd the 
 blacksmith. " She's been a little out o' order 
 for some time." 
 
 " Kot bewitched, my friend, but going back 
 into the bygone." 
 
 I left it, and passed on to East Road. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 NOW AND THEN. 
 
 When we drove up to the old farm-house 
 it welcomed us just as it did when Benny and 
 I went there together forty years before. 
 Cattle were lowing to be let out at the pas- 
 ture-bars, and its yard was littered with im- 
 plements of the day's labors. Just as then 
 working men were sitting upon its doorstone, 
 and a young girl was coming out with her 
 pail. It was as if the dear, bygone days had 
 all come back. 
 
 "We went towards the door. The men rose 
 respectfully to let us in. A pale-faced woman 
 met us, and asked us to walk into her sitting- 
 room. We thanked her, but said we would 
 stay in the kitchen, — that very same kitchen 
 through the windows of which I had seen the 
 two old people drop over the top of Merrill's 
 Hill on their way to West Eoad. 
 
 Very exactly that day came back to me. I 
 remembered how, just after they had gone out 
 of sight, an old man called Payne, a harmless 
 toper of cider, who wandered about the town, 
 
 61 
 
62 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 came into the kitchen and sat down unasked. 
 His hands made me think of birds' claws, as 
 he hekl them by the open fire to warm. He 
 was very thin and stooping, and his eyes were 
 bleared and bloodshot. When I told him that 
 my grandmother was away he seemed pleased, 
 and asked if there was any cider drawn. He 
 took my grandfather's blue-and-white mug 
 from the cupboard in the chimney-corner, and, 
 finding it empty, told me I need not trouble 
 myself to draw any, as he knew where to find 
 it. He shufiled down-stairs with a heavy step, 
 and was gone so long that I asked Hannah to 
 see what was the matter. Then she scolded 
 me for letting him go into the cellar at all, 
 and said he was " drinking at the tap." 
 
 When he came up his mug was full, and he 
 put it down close to the fire, and sat over it 
 and watched it with his rheumy eyes. 
 
 " Has your grandmother any peppers ?" he 
 asked. 
 
 I broke one for him from a string in the 
 cheese-room, and he dropped it into the mug. 
 Then he called for a spoon, and stirred it 
 round and round with his skinny old hands, 
 smacking his lips the while. 
 
 Little bubbles began to rise to the top of 
 the cider, and he said it was " getting mel- 
 low." When he carried the mug to his 
 
NOW AND THEN. 63 
 
 mouth, his hands shook so I thought he would 
 drop it. He had no doubt been drinking freely 
 at the tap, and was already quite tipsy ; still 
 he hardly breathed until he had swallowed the 
 last drop. Then he got up and went to the 
 door. On its threshold he turned back, but 
 it was only to tell me that I was a nice little 
 child, and gave old men such excellent, hot 
 cider that he wished my grandmother would 
 never come back. 
 
 The great fireplace where the old toper 
 had warmed his cider, and I had popped seed- 
 corn after he was gone, had been bricked up. 
 There used to be a crane in it Avith hooks, and 
 a trammel. The trammel was a bar full of 
 holes, by which the hooks were let down to 
 suit the bails of pots. Many quaint things 
 belonged to this fireplace. The frying-pan 
 was always planted upon a bed of coals in the 
 corner, with its handle stretching out upon a 
 chair. The toaster turned on a pivot, its 
 handle also kept in place by a chair. The 
 spit was managed by a crank, and the tin 
 baker had a lid with a hinge. Both stood 
 wide open to the fire. The tea-kettle, slipped 
 back on the crane, kept up a constant sputter- 
 ing ; and there seemed to be always hanging 
 by it a steaming pot, full of some kind of 
 food, which farmers' wives were apt to call 
 
64 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 " biled victuals." Potatoes were roasted in 
 an ash-heap in the corner, where also, if 
 properly wrapped, could be baked a light 
 cake of meal or flour. 
 
 It seemed but yesterday that I had seen in 
 this fireplace its crane heavy with a savory 
 burden. 
 
 I love that old farm-house. When in child- 
 hood I lived in it, it became mine. Every 
 suggestive, homely feature of it touches me. 
 Wliy not ? For it is more the using than the 
 gilding of objects Avhich makes them truly 
 valuable. "Whatever enters into the story of 
 your life becomes a part of you ; and many of 
 you have yet to learn that the most precious 
 things are those which are inlaid with mem- 
 ories of the loved and lost. 
 
 I asked the farmer's wife if I might go into 
 the garret. 
 
 " To be sure." 
 
 That was the most familiar spot in the whole 
 house. One of the first things I saw in it was the 
 rusty hook from which used to hang a braided 
 string of seed-corn. .This corn was carefully 
 chosen for size and fulness, and its intertwined 
 husks had to be white as milk. I know about 
 it, for I once held the end of the braid whilst 
 my grandfather carefully spliced the ears in 
 one by one. I remember how his old hands 
 
NOW AND THEN. 65 
 
 trembled, and how prett}^ the long yellow ears 
 looked, standinfy out from the braid. There 
 are as many jewels, of good color and shape, 
 gathered in at the farmers' harvests as can be 
 found in city shops, if one will only see all 
 that is to be seen in the beautiful fruits of the 
 earth. 
 
 I would have liked to stay longer in the dim, 
 memory-haunted old garret, and wished the 
 farmer's wife, who had followed me, would 
 leave me by myself. She seemed impatient, 
 so I reluctantly went down the stairs with her. 
 They were just as I remembered them, both 
 slanting and slippery. Something seemed to 
 clutch at my heart. Dear children, it was 
 "the ghost of a day that was dead," — that 
 day when the old folks went to West Road, 
 and I was left alone to pop corn in the farm- 
 house. 
 
 It is thus that memory catches up the slack- 
 ened and tangled and broken threads of the 
 past, and weaves them into a web for your 
 pleasing. It is a marvellous fabric, this web, 
 with its brightest end fastened to the beam. 
 
 Shall I tell you how I popped my seed- 
 corn ? First, I tried to get into the corn- 
 house, but vainly tugged at the ladder lying 
 underneath. 
 
 *' What are you doing, child ?" Hannah, the 
 
QQ OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 maid, called to me. '' Sakes alive ! if it's corn 
 you want, I'll break an ear from the seed- 
 strino^ in the o:arret. I^one of them in there 
 will pop at all. They're as soggy as punk- 
 wood. '^ 
 
 I remember that I thought it was hardly 
 right for her to take it, although she was a 
 long-tried, honest servant; and to this day I 
 wonder how, with my reverence for my grand- 
 father, I dared to pop an ear of his precious 
 seed-corn. I popped it just as my grandmother 
 baked her potatoes, or that Indian-meal cake 
 wrapped up in cabbage-leaves, which she some- 
 times made for us. A bed of hot ashes w^as 
 scooped out just inside one corner of the fire- 
 place. Into this I dropped a handful of corn, 
 covered it with the ashes, and placed around 
 it a border of lively coals. Five minutes of 
 impatient waiting, — fifteen they seemed ; there 
 came a slight shifting of particles in the heap ; 
 then a tumbling hither and thither. A puff 
 or two of dust, a whiz, a bang, — away they 
 went, ashes and white balls all over the hearth 
 and well-swept fioor. 
 
 Large-hearted seed-corn will pop nowhere 
 so well as in an ash-heap. If you shake thin- 
 skinned rice-corn, in a wire-net, on the top of 
 a kitchen-range, it will toss up with one spurt, 
 but all its grains together will not make so 
 
NOW AND THEN. 67 
 
 much noise as would one kernel of my grand- 
 father's seed-corn, when it hounced out of an 
 ash-heap across the kitchen floor. 
 
 The farm-house was not very much changed. 
 Its paint had hardly been touched since my 
 ancestors' day. Over the east-room fireplace 
 were smoke-stains made forty 3'ears before, 
 when my grandfather burned out his chimney 
 w^ith straw and nearly burned his house as well. 
 The kitchen-walls had turned from brick- red 
 to brown, and the whole structure was grim 
 with a sturdy old age. Strange faces in it hurt 
 me. I had to go out of doors for breathing- 
 space. I thought I would look for the oven 
 of the " golden glory." 
 
 The corn-house was tottering upon three 
 legs; the cider-mill was nowhere to be seen. 
 The barns were in tolerable order, but the 
 shed had a hole in its roof and a door hang- 
 ing by one hinge. In its rear my grandmother 
 had built her oven. 
 
 A little girl was close at my heels, — a little 
 girl with staring eyes and a dirty face and 
 mouth wide open. I am sure she thought I 
 was crazy. I wished she would go into the 
 house. 
 
 How rank the grass was behind the shed ; it 
 was full of hardy dock. The little girl asked 
 me if I w^ere '' picking greens." 
 
68 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 " Hush, child," I said, and went on with my 
 search. 
 
 It was of no use. The earth was fat and the 
 weeds were lush, but never a flat stone could 
 I find. 
 
 " Have you lost anything ?" the curious girl 
 again asked. 
 
 " Lost anything, child ? I have come a day's 
 journey to find the oven in which my grand- 
 mother baked her * golden glory,' and where 
 is it ?" 
 
 " I haven't done nothing with it. When did 
 she bake it ?" 
 
 " More than a hundred years ago." 
 
 Then it came over me how foolish I was to 
 think that even stones would stay untouched 
 more than a hundred years. I was ashamed. 
 
 The o^irl was afraid of me. She flew like 
 the wind to the house ; and directly upon its 
 doorsteps swarmed all its inmates, staring at 
 me in wonder. 
 
 So persistently do country people treasure 
 up the incidents of their quiet lives, that I 
 suppose they even yet talk about me with 
 their neighbors as that crazy creature who 
 came hunting, one summer's day, after her 
 grandmother's " golden glory." 
 
 I do not care to tell you the name of the town 
 in which East Koad and West Road are to be 
 
NOW AND THEN. 69 
 
 found. It is called a "hard farming town," 
 which means that it is both rocky and hilly. It 
 is not many miles aw^ay from a rugged mountain 
 range, and seems like an after-toss from that 
 great upheaval. If you were to climb up and 
 down its tortuous roads, with your eyes earth- 
 ward, you might spend all your time pitying 
 the beast that bore you, and the men and 
 Avomen who wrestle with its slantwise and 
 stubborn soil. But, like Abijah and Em'ly 
 Susan, when you come to the crown of a hill, 
 '^ look off, and then you will behold the glory 
 of it." 
 
 East Road on its perch. West Road in its 
 hollow, and every other hamlet within sight 
 will be melted into the green billows which 
 stretch out from the mountain slopes, and the 
 beautiful landscape will so delight you that 
 you can never afterwards think of that town, 
 famous for its hills, without a heart-hunger. 
 
CHAPTER YIL 
 
 safford's brook. 
 
 Betsy's father lived close by Safford's Brook, 
 where it broke through a stone wall and flowed 
 under a low arch across the road. Out it came 
 from the heart of a wood, mostly of beeches, 
 in which, as far as you could see, it was over- 
 hung by drooping branches. In these its 
 edges were black and soggy, and thick with 
 ferns and dogwood. It was also dark and 
 gloomy; but just as soon as it got into the 
 sunshine, in front of Safford's cottage, it 
 began to dance. 
 
 Where it flowed through the hole in the 
 wall it dragged out long grasses, which always 
 looked as if they were trying to hold them- 
 selves back. Then it spread over a gravelly 
 bed full of whoel-ruts made by travellers, who 
 in summer drove through it to water their 
 cattle and horses. 
 
 Watering-places are almost sure to be found 
 by country roadsides wherever the highway 
 crosses a brook. Most of them are safe, clear 
 70 
 
SAFFOItiyS BROOK. 71 
 
 as crystal, seldom changing bed or aspect. It 
 is the delight of boys to wade through them 
 with their trousers rolled above their knees, 
 and I have seen little girls with their shoes 
 and stockings tucked under their arms doing 
 the like. Now and then a crossing is quite 
 treacherous, with soft bottom, apt to be 
 w^ashed out by summer showers, and to play 
 pranks with travellers. All are the homes of 
 mint, and wild flowers and tiny fishes, which 
 dart in and out the low arches of the roadway. 
 Horses never seem to trust a path which 
 turns from the highway into a brook. First, 
 the farmer jumps out and unhooks a check- 
 rein. Then the animal cautiously feels his 
 way into the middle of the little current, 
 where he sniffs and paws and swells himself 
 out with long draughts. 
 
 The watering-place of Safford's Brook was 
 of the best. It was only a mile away from the 
 village of Whitefield Corner, and was much 
 beset by boys and girls for its summer gifts. 
 Its bottom was sound, and so pebbly that horses 
 stirred it in vain for roily drink. Under the 
 roadway arch it looked deep and sullen ; but 
 when fairly out it spread into a shoal pool, 
 the borders of which were packed with mint. 
 The wall through which it flowed into a 
 field beyond was quite hidden by clematis, 
 
72 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 and in the field mucli orchis grew. By the 
 wall was a bed of bulrushes, and farther on a 
 still larger bed of cats'-tail. 
 
 I knew a boy who used daily in summer to 
 water a horse at this crossing. He rode his 
 beast bare-backed, and clung as closely as if 
 he had been a centaur. It was the ugliest 
 horse I ever saw, — unevenly mottled with 
 chocolate and white, lame of a hind foot, 
 with a straggling mane and pinkish eyes. 
 The Whitefield children called it the " calico 
 horse," and never, outside of a circus, could 
 another such strange-looking steed be seen. 
 It was very fleet of foot once, and even at an 
 advanced age a full dose of oats would set the 
 creature up to its old tricks. 
 
 A willow-tree stood close by this watering- 
 place, overhanging it Avith long, pendulous 
 limbs. The village boys and girls loved that 
 tree. They began to tug and hack at it with 
 the first putting out of its pussies in spring, and 
 its sod was always strewn with twigs. It was 
 hardy, and had given to children blossoms and 
 " whistle-timber" for many years. 
 
 Did you ever make a willow-whistle ? You 
 have not ! Let me tell you how it is done. 
 Take your twig, three inches long, while it is 
 green and tender witli the first gush of spring. 
 Avoid knots and all defects of bark. Cut one 
 
SAFFORD'S BROOK. 73 
 
 end squarely off, the other obliquely. An inch 
 from the sharp point of this oblique end make 
 a deep notch in your wood. Below this notch, 
 half-way down the stick, draw your knife evenly 
 around the bark, cutting through it. Above 
 the line thus defined gently pound and mould it 
 until it loosens. Then give it a sudden twist, 
 and it will slip from its disengaged stock. How 
 smoothly it will slide off, and what a pure, 
 white, satin surface will come to light ! 
 
 Cut now a slii^ht shavincr from the notch in 
 the stick to its point, and the heart of your 
 whistle is ready. Wet it well in the mouth 
 (nothing but saliva will do), then put it back 
 into its socket, and blow a blast which will 
 send all the little fishes scampering under the 
 bridge, and make the plodding farm-horses 
 prick up their ears. 
 
 You have spoiled your first one, have you ? 
 You were too impatient; you pounded too hard; 
 you were rough, and twisted and cracked the 
 bark. Your knife, it may be, Avas not sharp 
 enough; though, as I remember, the boys of 
 Whitefield Corner used often verj^ dull jack- 
 knives for the purpose. 
 
 Old Satford, Betsy's father, was not a hand- 
 some man; besides, he Avas a drunkard. Betsy 
 got lier red hair from him, and, 1 am sorry to 
 say, a very quick temper. Dame Safibrd, as 
 
74 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 she was called, was a brisk, hard-working little 
 body, with twinkling black eyes and a lying 
 tongue. She went out washing by the day, and 
 was paid twenty-five cents, besides now and 
 then old clothes and cold victuals. In winter she 
 gathered fagots for fuel from the neighboring 
 wood, and once froze her limbs while so doing. 
 It was whispered that she w^as a little "light- 
 fingered." A ghost glided one night through a 
 moonlighted chamber, and the child who saw it 
 said it looked wonderfully like Dame Safford. 
 The next morninsr some blankets were missino^ 
 from a closet, and tracks made to a cellar with 
 flour and Indian meal showed that this ghost 
 had a fondness for pork. It was the talk of the 
 village for a week or more, and the women, 
 w^ith a nod of their heads that way, declared 
 that the blankets were stored " not a thousand 
 miles from the pound." 
 
 Should you ever be told that the oldtime 
 women of "Whitefield Corner were great gos- 
 sips, do not believe it. They were lynx-eyed and 
 had no mercy for bad morals. Sin can never 
 hide in Whitefield Corner. Walking along its 
 high table-land, with its far-reaching outlook, 
 a person becomes, as it were, translucent. The 
 converging gaze of its quiet life observes his 
 every act. If he is what the country people 
 call '' talked about," it is his own fault, for 
 
SAF FORD'S BROOK. 75 
 
 there is no spot on earth where the sublime 
 beauty of a pure life is sooner seen and felt 
 than in this same TVhitefield Corner. 
 
 Dame Safford was one of the neatest of 
 housekeepers. One could almost taste the 
 cleanliness of her sittinsvroom. The boards 
 of its floor, worn smooth from much scrub- 
 bing, were bossed with shining, thick-set 
 knots. From its walls, also of unpainted 
 wood, hung a curious medley of things ; and 
 upon the jambs of its fireplace were nailed 
 loops of leather, into which were thrust pipes 
 and knives, the latter much the worse for 
 Avear. Its jagged, sunken hearth in summer 
 was covered with spruce boughs, which also 
 filled the fireplace. A clean bed, a few chairs, 
 a table, and a spinning-wheel were the room's 
 only furniture, and yet it was delightful. 
 
 Its four open windows looked out upon the 
 Avood and the brook, and through them came 
 odor of mint and the sweet murmur of running 
 water. My dear children, many of you know 
 Avhat the tricksy glamour of that Avild scenery 
 was ; hoAv its streaks of sunshine glinted across 
 the floor; how it curtained the small windows 
 with a tender green ; how it made the whole 
 air tremulous with a delicious pulsation of 
 both color and sound ; how it turned the clean, 
 bare room inside out and made my own little 
 
76 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 heart tlirill with delight. There is nothing in 
 poverty more touching than this gikling of it 
 by nature. It is as if the ck^ar okl mother 
 were trying to make Ufe as bright and easy as 
 possible to all her children, and when at last 
 they are given back to her she treats them all 
 alike. 
 
 The sitting-room of the little cottage by Saf- 
 ford's Brook, mean as it was, when washed 
 and opened to her eye was caressed by her as 
 tenderly as a real mother kisses the face of her 
 child. To this day I remember how it seemed 
 to absorb outlying brightness. It had a square 
 entry, which let you out upon a broad, unhewn 
 stone step. There was a rut worn across this 
 entry from the sitting-room to the doorstep, 
 and the latter was sunk so low in the earth 
 that when you sat down on it a whole colony 
 of ants ran towards you from its outer edges. 
 Close by was a potato-patch and a strip of 
 growing corn. Pecking amongst these was 
 almost always a hen with a brood of chickens, 
 while down by the brookside strutted a gan- 
 der and a flock of geese. A cow which pas- 
 tured by the roadside had a small shed not far 
 off, and when ^' tied up" mooed at you in 
 friendly fashion. Betsy used to say that she 
 was '' tired to death of the cluck and scratch- 
 ing of hens," and as for the gander, " a tater" 
 
SAFFORD'S BROOK. 77 
 
 could hardl}^ " get a chance to grow under Lis 
 everlasting strut." Bees buzzed about a small 
 garden-patch, which next to the wood was 
 marked out by a row of sunflowers. Flies 
 swarmed everywhere, and late in the afternoon 
 slanting sunbeams, caught between house and 
 wood, were alive with insects. At night, from 
 the wxt brookside came a far-reaching chorus 
 of frogs. 
 
 I mention all these things because they were 
 parts and incidents of that humble living 
 w^hich, in spite of its poverty, could not as a 
 picture be otherwise than beautiful. There 
 was no brighter spot anywhere than Dame 
 SafFord's doorstep on a summer day. Still I 
 suppose much depended upon the eyes which 
 saw it, — whether or not they loved the verdure 
 and sunshine and wild music well enough to 
 impart to the mean cottage, through their 
 glamour, a share of the day's brightness. 
 
 I forgot to tell you when I was inside about 
 the mantelpiece and a cupboard in a corner. 
 The mantel was very high up and narrow. On 
 it were two plaster vases full of mock fruit. 
 Between these was an image of praying Sam- 
 uel, also of plaster. The bases of them all 
 projected half-way beyond the mantel, and 
 they had to be tied to the wall. Over them 
 hunsT a framed woodcut of Geor^ce Washing:- 
 
78 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 ton. In front of the four windows dangled as 
 many fat balls of thistle-down. If you w^ish 
 for the like, pluck largest-sized thistle-blos- 
 soms from the roadside, cut off" their pink tops, 
 pluck aAvay their green scales, and then hang 
 them in the sun. I have known Avise country- 
 women to amuse themselves in this way, and 
 I do greatly value such innocent pastimes of 
 rural life. 
 
 There was always much of what Betsy 
 called "green stuff '^ about the room, — spruce 
 and pine boughs, asparagus, and tumblers full 
 of blossoms between the plaster vases and 
 praying Samuel. These were grateful to the 
 eye, but I -suppose, after all, that what made 
 the place so very pleasant was its cleanliness. 
 The corner cupboard was full of odd dishes, 
 many of them chipped and cracked. They 
 were mostly washing-day gifts, highly prized 
 by their owner ; and if variety of shape and 
 color has worth, were of great value. They 
 w^ere never used, but as things to look at were 
 interesting to a curious child. They were 
 beautiful pieces to me, and I never see a so- 
 called " china collection" that I do not think 
 of Dame Safford's corner cupboard. 
 
 Betsy took me up-stairs one day to see her 
 " cubby-house." We had to climb a ladder 
 and go through a square hole, down upon 
 
SAFFORD'S BROOK. 79 
 
 which fell a trap-door, " handj," she said, 
 when her father was in a " tantrum." This 
 euhbj-house was made of stones and old shin- 
 gles, and her bits of crockery had been picked 
 up from ash-heaps and door-yards. Benny 
 and I afterwards spent hours in poking about 
 with sticks for specimens. We used to wipe 
 the worthless bits upon our sleeves and pol- 
 ish them with our hands. I am not sure 
 that they were worthless, for they turned rare 
 tints and painted posies up to our delighted 
 eyes, and nothing is worthless which can give 
 innocent pleasure to a child. 
 
CHAPTER YIII. 
 
 KOCK-WORK. 
 
 Rocks lie broadcast upon the fields of "White- 
 field, and a fresh crop of them is always being 
 turned up by the plough. An underlying stra- 
 tum of rock has made half the town pasture 
 land. It keeps coming to the surface of the 
 soil, and in one place, on the border-line of the 
 neighboring town of Sanapee, it is tilted up 
 into a vast, steep ledge, full of seams, and 
 called TumbledoAvn Jack, because a horse by 
 the name of Jack once fell over it. In the 
 town of Sanapee itself it bulges up into a bald- 
 topped mountain, to which it gives the name of 
 " Gray-face." 
 
 Rattlesnakes, for many years, were common 
 on Gray-face, whence, in summer, they came 
 down into the plains below\ Pickers of huckle- 
 berries had to be on their guard against them. 
 One, w^ith seven rattles, killed near Gray-face, 
 was brought into Whitefield Corner and nailed 
 to the side of a store. All the children in the 
 town came to see it. These snakes were killed 
 80 
 
ROCK-WORK. 81 
 
 out by a fire wliicli swept over Gray-face from 
 the plains. This was kindled in low bushes, 
 some said by boys, and others by a spark 
 dropped from a man's pipe. It was in a time 
 of drouth, Avhen underbrush and grass were as 
 dry as tinder. It lit np the whole horizon at 
 night, and sent back great waves of smoke into 
 Whitefield, so that through it children could 
 look at the sun at midday without winking. 
 The air w^as thick with the odor of burned 
 earth and pines, and the side of the mountain 
 was as if covered with a pall. It was a sublime 
 sight at night. I remember how I lay awake, 
 and watched the lithe tongues of flame leap 
 from tree to tree, devouring as they went. How 
 mysterious and potent, yet beautiful, they 
 seemed ! I did not w^onder that the heathen 
 worshipped God with fire. 
 
 It burned three days. Then the wind shifted, 
 and it came slyly creeping, half under ground, 
 close up to the outlying fields of Whitefield. 
 A fence and a tree caught. Men went out to 
 fight it, and little boys cried " fire !" along the 
 street. Furrows were made by ploughs, and 
 it was beaten back with brush. Meanwhile a 
 cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, came sail- 
 ing over the crown of Ked Mountain. This 
 grew fast, and almost before men's hearts were 
 gladdened by sight of it, the little boys said it 
 
82 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 had begun to sprinkle. Eain had come at last, 
 and the foe was conquered. This was the worst 
 forest fire the town had ever known. Farmers 
 declared that a century would not replace their 
 lost timber, and Gray-face was bald to its base. 
 It sent, however, no more rattlesnakes into the 
 plain, where, in a year or two, the huckleberry 
 bushes were thicker than ever. 
 
 Whitefield has been much pitied because of 
 the sternness of its soil, but I think its rocks 
 are its glory. Its ledges, lying slantwise, fling 
 oft' the snow in spring, and smoking in the 
 sun, give color and glow to a landscape. In 
 summer their deep grays lend variety to it. 
 Lathem's pasture would be no pasture without 
 rocks ; and Safford's Brook, the sparkling 
 waters of which are filtered by a stony bot- 
 tom, would lose half its beauty were the nat- 
 ural stepping-stones taken away from its bed 
 and borders. 
 
 All the houses of Whitefield might have 
 been built from its loose-lying rocks; but 
 these seem to have been used mostly for the 
 making of walls. A stone wall, at first sight, 
 seems the roughest kind of a fence, but in E^ew 
 England it is a true outcropping of the soil, 
 and when left alone quickly clothes itself with 
 a beautiful, wild growth. It ought to be last- 
 ing, but as it is generally piled it is often 
 
ROCK-WORK. 83 
 
 otherwise, warping with the first toss of a 
 frost. Of this kind are the single ones, having 
 hut one thickness of stone, and huilt upon tlie 
 surface of the ground. In such thieving boys 
 are ready to make a gap, wherever anything 
 good to eat is to he found on the other side. 
 This is needless, for if ever nature does refuse 
 to harm a hoy it is when he is climbing a stone 
 wall. 
 
 The double wall, well piled, with a drain 
 full of small stones underneath, will last many 
 years. When in process of time it has sprawled 
 out, it gets matted with raspberry and black- 
 berry bushes, and is the favorite home of the 
 wild cherry. Bees love the sunny side of it, 
 and squirrels are its rightful denizens. De- 
 lightful, crazy old wall, with your treacherous 
 foothold, how much you give to the children 
 who push aside your thorny covering ! 
 
 There was such a w^all around Farmer 
 Lathem's orchard, in wdiich the Whitefield 
 Corner boys used to make hoards of the old 
 man's best fruit done up in hay. It was 
 easy to climb, giving access to overhanging 
 branches, and lodging apples in its crevices. 
 Two sweet-fruited trees were the delight of 
 school -children, who wore the wall under 
 them into an easy slant, up which they 
 walked. The old farmer covered the top of 
 
 'P^'y 
 
84 OLDTIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 it with brush, but that was of no use, for out 
 of it the young pilferers pulled sticks, with 
 which they knocked off their apples. 
 
 The rocks which had been left over from 
 the building of this wall were heaped up in 
 a corner, and always had the name of being 
 snaky. Over this heap a shiny-leaved vine 
 ran, which was called ''marcry" by farmers' 
 wives. This was poison-iv}^, and once some 
 boys, Avho were hoarding apples there, were 
 badly damaged by it. Farmer Lathem said 
 he saw " the young rascals at work," and it 
 made him " chuckle" to think how they w^ould 
 be served. 
 
 Whiteiield farmers went out by the day 
 building stone walls. They seemed slower 
 than snails, but their work grew^ apace. I 
 saw Farmer Lathem and his son once tug an 
 hour with crow-bars to get a great stone into 
 place. This was forty years ago, and it still 
 stands in the wall where they put it. Out of 
 respect to such hard-working builders how 
 can one ever make a gap in a wall ? 
 
 In almost every field in Whitefield was a 
 huge bowlder, which had to be let alone by 
 the. farmer; and, with its wild growth, bo- 
 came a beautiful ornament. A favorite one 
 in Lathem's pasture, much resorted to by 
 children, was called, from its shape, "Chair 
 
rock-work: 85 
 
 Rock," and might have seated several giants. 
 It was blown to pieces to make room for a 
 raih'oad ; but I shall always see that mass of 
 granite just as it loomed up to its oldtime 
 chiUl-lovers of AVhitefield Corner. I^ear this 
 some boys came across a rattlesnake one da}^, 
 a truant, no doubt, from Gray-face. It was 
 almost buried in a hole, and its outlying tail 
 gave them warning, ^one was ever seen 
 there before or after, so I suppose this one 
 went back to its old haunt. 
 
 A rock by Saftbrd's Brook was famous as a 
 fishing-place. It slanted inwards at its base, 
 where the eddying brook scooped out a basin, 
 in which the water was deep and dark. Here 
 trout loved to hide, and barefooted boys, 
 hanging over the top of the rock, fished for 
 them. 
 
 The "• forehanded" citizens of Whitefield 
 Corner all had hewed door-stones and gate- 
 posts. Farmer Lathem and his son were 
 
 famous cutters of rock, and the alternate 
 strokes of their hammer were as regular as 
 clockwork. The best door-stone, however, 
 was Farmer Lathem's OAvn, wliich he had 
 transplanted, unhewn, from his pasture to 
 the low-lying threshold of his door. Worn 
 smooth by the peltings of countless storms, 
 with uneven but rounded edges, it was full 
 
86 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 of little hollows, where rain-water settled, and 
 its sides were mottled with moss. It sank 
 somewhat, and, fringed close with weeds and 
 grass, its color of a tender gray, it seemed to 
 have sprung, where it was, out of the earth. 
 Close by the house there was a hole under- 
 neath it. The farmer's wife, coming out one 
 morning to sweep the step, found a milk- 
 adder, of enormous length, stretched across 
 it, which at once ran into the hole. The old 
 farmer sought for the snake in vain. He 
 said he did not believe it was an adder; 
 he '' never thought Judith w^ould lie," but 
 "women folks" were ''skeery;" and when 
 a woman was " skeered" she couldn't " tell 
 a striped snake from an adder." 
 
 Milk-adders were supposed by Whitelield 
 people to be poisonous and especially fond of 
 milk. All the children believed that, when 
 this snake left the door-stone for the hole, it 
 was on its way to the woman's dairy, where 
 it skimmed all her milk. This was why 
 Farmer Lathem, who sold butter and cheese, 
 tried to make them think that it was a striped 
 snake instead of an adder. 
 
 The most reliable rock-work of "Whitefield 
 Corner was to be found in its wells, most of 
 which had been faced with stone by Farmer 
 Lathem and his son. A well had to be dug 
 
ROCK, wo UK. 87 
 
 deep there to get below the ledge, under Avliich 
 alone could be reached a cool, pure, never- 
 failing spring of water. The digging of a 
 new well made talk in the village. The ledge 
 had to be shattered with powder, and its ex- 
 plosion, followed by a low rumbling, made all 
 the dishes rattle. Loafers left their taverns 
 and hung over the brink of the hole as it 
 deepened, enlivening work by stories of wells 
 which had " caved in" and buried the men who 
 were digging them. When the task was done 
 a shout came up from below, and speedily 
 every woman in Whitefield Corner knew that 
 her neighbor, who was blasting for a well, 
 had " struck spring water" at last. 
 
 Toads had a trick of hopping into the wells 
 of Whitefield, and buckets of tumbling from 
 their handles. It did not matter so much, as 
 old Safford, when not in his cups, was always 
 ready, for a quarter, to wriggle his way down 
 the slippery sides of a well I have a silver 
 snuff-box which was fished up from one. It 
 was full of snuff when it went down, but 
 when brought up by old Safford it was empty. 
 Stories of things found in the bottoms of its 
 wells have passed into the traditions of the 
 town. 
 
 I^ext to the pound, in my day, an old well 
 just outside the village had the firmest hold 
 
88 OLD TIME CHI LB LIFE. 
 
 on the imaginations of the children of the 
 Corner. It had not been in nse for more than 
 thirty years, and Farmer Lathem said it was 
 still " as neat a piece of rock-work" as could 
 be " seen anywhere." The house to Avhich it 
 belonged had passed awaj^, and not a trace of 
 its own wood-work was left. All other de- 
 serted wells that I have seen were full of 
 rocks and rubbish ; but if you tossed a pebble 
 into this one, it would splash into water far 
 down. The truth is this well, like the pound, 
 was said to be haunted, and though the chil- 
 dren would have been ashamed to confess it, 
 they were all afraid to go near it. ^Now and 
 then one bolder than the rest would creep to 
 its brink and peep over, but no one ever saw 
 the skeleton which was said to be lying below. 
 There was a tradition that the well had " caved 
 in and killed a man" who was at work in it, 
 hence its evil repute. 
 
 A great rock cropping out of trees, just in 
 the edge of Lathem's w^ood, made the best 
 kind of a bugbear for the village little ones, 
 who used to come flvins: home after nis^htfall, 
 declaring that they had seen a ghost. Outside 
 of the Avood, close to the roadside, was another 
 rock, from which gushed a little stream of 
 water. It came hardly faster than a drop at 
 a time, but the selectmen put a spout under it. 
 
ROCK- WORK. 89 
 
 wliicli carried it sparkling into a tub below. 
 I hear it now trickling with a tender gurgle 
 from its lips of rock, the gift of a woodland 
 spring. Travellers stopped to drink from it, 
 and boys and girls, open-mouthed, used to 
 stoop down and catch it as it ran. The waters 
 were pure and cool. They fell over the tub, 
 and settled in pools at its base ; but still the 
 tinkling little stream kept running from the 
 crevice into the spout. Where it came out 
 from the rocks a deliciously fine, filtering 
 moss gathered, and there was cut a tiny chan- 
 nel, smooth as glass. 
 
 Whenever the waters of such a spring could 
 be diverted to the roadside it was done, some- 
 times by rude spouts, overlapping each other, 
 sometimes through the hollow trunks of old 
 trees; and often, trickling down hills by the 
 side of the road, almost swallowed up by the 
 grass and stones as they went, they were 
 caught at the bottom. It mattered not into 
 what kind of a thing the waters ran, they 
 were filtered clean, were cool and never-fail- 
 ing, and Avere a delight to the eye. You 
 have drank perchance from such a spring. 
 There were many scattered over the town of 
 Whitefield, kept from drying up in summer 
 by its overlying rocks, — its beautiful gray 
 rocks, mottled with moss, hard to the touch, 
 7 
 
90 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 but cropping out of the soil, as the heart of it, 
 with a vigor and heauty of their own. I 
 never read in Isaiah of " rivers of water in 
 a dry place" and the " shadow of a great rock 
 in a weary land" that I do not think of the 
 pure springs, and the restful and beautiful 
 rocks of Whitefield. 
 
CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 DEACON SAUNDERS. 
 
 Half a dozen homes near a little pond 
 made up what is called the Saunders ]N"eighbor- 
 hood, so named from the old deacon himself, 
 whose house, set upon a hill, pointed upwards 
 its sharp gables, and joined its gray bulk to 
 the earth with a facing and steps of rock-work. 
 Although the house itself had been well kept, 
 the tooth of time had gnawed its many out- 
 buildings, the roofs of w^hich were ragged and 
 mossy. It was a very grand old house, with a 
 positive air of refinement and respectability. I 
 never knew one which seemed more utterly a 
 part of the landscape. It had truly mellowed 
 into it. Four poplars, old and somewhat dead 
 at top, stood before one gable end. Eed Moun- 
 tain and Gray-face in the distance; the near 
 pond and wood; the outlying fields ; the belfry 
 of AVhitefield ; all seemed to belong to it, and it 
 to them, — this time-stained, stately, beautiful, 
 old structure. 
 
 The farm upon which it stood had been given 
 
 91 
 
92 OLD TIME CHILDLJFE. 
 
 to the deacon's father, the first minister of the 
 parish, who filled his ofiice with great dignity 
 and success for fifty years. The deacon himself 
 was a man of excellent ability, and had what 
 the humbler people called " college learning." 
 There was a tradition that he had been set 
 apart for the ministry ; but that, falling from 
 over-study into ill-health, he betook himself 
 to farming. ISText to Parson Meeker he was 
 reverenced for his goodness; and truly the 
 apostolic beauty of his character was not a whit 
 behind that of the parson. He led a blame- 
 less life, and no evil word was ever spoken in 
 Whitefield of him. When he grew old he was 
 called the "good old deacon;" and he was 
 permitted for more than half a century to em- 
 bellish in his ancestral home a hard-working 
 farmer's life with the culture of a Christian 
 gentleman. 
 
 Goodness and gentleness seemed to be an 
 inheritance of his family. He had a sister 
 married to an intelligent farmer, who, because 
 of her virtues, always went by the name of 
 " Aunt Baxter." Parson Meeker called her a 
 " mother in Israel," and got her to rebuke the 
 faults of female church members. Betsy de- 
 clared that it Avas " a bother to have such a 
 saint round." I hear her now, as she sat se- 
 rene in a certain village parlor, knitting-work 
 
DEACON SAUNDERS. 93 
 
 in hand, softly telling one of .the lawyer's wives 
 that she and Mrs. Meeker had the name of 
 working their hired girls too hard. Her soft 
 voice and her dovelike eyes disarmed all ill- 
 feeling. 
 
 Like most other Whitefield w^omen, she was 
 said to he " good in sickness." How many of 
 the oldtime, village mothers, if living, would 
 know what that means, — mothers w-ho have 
 sat with her through the slow-paced hours of 
 night hy the bedside of a beloved child, whose 
 pains have been soothed by her noiseless and 
 watchful ministrations. A mending patient 
 always brightened her face ; and no one was 
 more anxious than she for chance to kindle 
 hope in aching hearts. Many a mother, at the 
 coming of a mocking dawn, has turned, with 
 haggard face, to this w^oman, who touched her 
 lightly perhaps with a hand, or whispered in 
 her ear, changed by such act from a fellow- 
 watcher to a ministering angel. 
 
 The deacon's wife, who came from a sea- 
 port town, had a certain elegance of mien and 
 dress w^hich carried weight with other w^omen. 
 I think children were a little afraid of her, for 
 she was a very fine lady. She became her 
 stately home, in which she dispensed a hospi- 
 tality remembered to this day. When Parson 
 Meeker, as he sometimes did in summer. 
 
94 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 preached on Sunday in the red school-house 
 of the Saunders Neighborhood, the chief 
 women of Whitefield Corner were invited by 
 her to luncli. Their children went also, to 
 whom it was a great treat to sit on the narrow 
 window-seats of her parlor and stare at the 
 sea-shells and tall silver candlesticks on the 
 mantel. 
 
 The daily life of this farmhouse was de- 
 lightful to the looker-on. It was exceptionally 
 refined, because its never-ending labor Avas 
 borne with ease and dignity. 
 
 Whenever a farmer helped his housewife 
 with her tasks, lightening them also the while 
 with pleasant speech, her crowded days never 
 *' dragged." They were instead, for swift- 
 ness, like a weaver's shuttle, and the web of 
 them, though plain, had few flaws. Here and 
 there, to be sure, on some lonely farm, the 
 woman trod her weary round alone ; the hus- 
 band always tired and cross. Then, brooding 
 unnoticed over her hard lot, which was apt to 
 grow harder each succeeding year, such a 
 woman has been known to slip off at dusk 
 into a garret, with a skein of yarn of her own 
 hopeless weaving, and, knotting it to a beam, 
 to flino^ her weifirht of care off and launch 
 into the great unknown. "Woe to the liouse 
 to which this tragedy came ! — haunted ever- 
 
DEACON SAUNDERS. 95 
 
 more. N'o crueller punishment could heart- 
 broken woman inflict upon those who had 
 hurt her than the reproach, which never died 
 out from a family name, that she had hung 
 herself. 
 
 I remember a day in early childhood spent 
 most pleasantly in Deacon Saunders's fine old 
 house. I found Mrs. Saunders in her kitchen, 
 just taking down the lid to her oven, into 
 which I looked with her. It was full of bread 
 and pies, covered up with pieces of paper, and 
 close to its mouth was a sputtering earthen 
 pot, over the sides of which trickled a thick, 
 brown, toothsome - looking juice. This was 
 from an Indian meal and sweet apple pudding, 
 the crust of which she tipped up with the end 
 of a knife, and said, — 
 
 " It is growing red. I think it will be done 
 in season for dinner." 
 
 She told me I might go into the garden 
 with her and help her gather some vegetables. 
 The garden was as bright as flowers and sun- 
 shine could make it, and was noisy with bees. 
 When we came back we set our baskets down 
 by the shed-door, and Mrs. Saunders blew a 
 horn. This was to call Samuel *' to string the 
 beans." She said Samuel always broke them 
 the right way, and never left any strings be- 
 hind. There was a click at the garden-gate, 
 
96 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 a shuffling down its walk, and a moon-faced, 
 middle-aged man came up. "When told that 
 he was to ^' string the beans" he said " Yes,'' 
 and laughed as if he Avcre very much pleased. 
 
 Mrs. Saunders cut off the top of her beets 
 for greens. She did it very carefully, lest by 
 bruising the vegetables she should let their 
 blood out into the pot. The carrots and 
 turnips she scraped quite clean, and pulled 
 off the outer leaves from the cabbage. Then 
 she washed them all in a great wooden bowl, 
 — a beautiful bowl, scooped out of curly maple, 
 and full of veins and knots. Samuel drew 
 water from a well in the shed with a wind- 
 lass, which, when the bucket went down, flew 
 round with a whiz ; and, when it came back, 
 was very hard to turn. Samuel laughed, and 
 the more he had to tus; the better he seemed 
 to like it. 
 
 I had never seen a man so fond of laughing, 
 and shortly I began to laugh too. Then Mrs. 
 Saunders said I had better not, for if Samuel 
 once got started he didn't know how to stop. 
 When I told Betsy about him, she exclaimed, 
 " Why, bless me, child, didn't you know he 
 was a fool ?" And, afterwards, I heard Farmer 
 Lathem tell a man who was helping him in a 
 shower, that he wished he had a " critter like 
 Samuel," for if there was " one thing handier 
 
DEACON SAUNDERS. 97 
 
 than another to have about a farm" that thing 
 was a fool. 
 
 I liave told, you of the getting of these veg- 
 etables that you may know what made the 
 dinner so good; and why what rough farmers 
 call " garden sass," and when cooked " biled 
 vittles," makes about the poorest kind of a din- 
 ner when bought from a stall, but is admirable 
 when taken fresh from the earth and properly 
 cooked. 
 
 The flavor of an oldtime boiled dinner has 
 trailed down to many people, through the flesh- 
 pots of to-day, with a pleasant relish ; and, de- 
 spite the gibes flung at ^' garden sauce," does 
 not seem to have been supplanted by better. 
 Here it is, just as my grandmother served it. 
 A large piece of corned beef, with a square of 
 pork, both boiled tender, in the centre of a 
 platter, hedged in by cabbage dotted with 
 potatoes. A side dish of blood-red beets, 
 another of sliced yellow turnips, and still 
 another of parsnips afloat in butter. Lastly, a 
 tureen of golden squash, seasoned with care 
 and skill. It was a beautiful dinner to look 
 at, colored like earth's best jewels. Common 
 farmers' wives served these vegetabks together 
 on one large platter, and with them a mug of 
 hard cider. The Indian pudding, flavored 
 with sweet apples, which came after, was the 
 
98 OLD TIME CHI LB LIFE. 
 
 one oldtirae triumph of skilled hands, the 
 aroma and relish of which cannot even be 
 simulated by common labor. 
 
 My grandmother used to say that a " boiled 
 dinner" to be well cooked must be put to stew- 
 ing early in the morning, — the meat started 
 first, and the vegetables added, one after an- 
 other, as their fibre required ; all in the same 
 pot, with the exception of the squash and the 
 beets ; the squash being dryer when steamed, 
 and. the beets having a trick of turning ever}^- 
 thing else red. My grandmother also said 
 that some women-folks thought a '^ boiled 
 dinner the easiest kind to get ;" but it always 
 made her " busy the best part of a day." The 
 pot, she said, '-' must be kept simmering, and 
 the soul of the meat must go into the hearts 
 of turnips and cabbage and potatoes and pars- 
 nips, and butter must go into them all." 
 
 I ate my dinner from a large tray on a stand 
 by the window of an inner room, which over- 
 looked the little pond, and from which one 
 could see the belfry of "Whitefield Corner. 
 Mrs. Saunders put me there, she said, because 
 the deacon, who was " breaking up a piece of 
 pasture-land," had " a gang of men to work 
 for him," and she did not think it would be 
 pleasant for me to eat with them. I saw 
 them, however, through the open door, around 
 
DEACON SAUNDERS. 99 
 
 their table, red-shirtecl and bronzed. Samuel 
 sat opposite to the door; and, when he spied me, 
 began to laugh in such a helpless way that Mrs. 
 Saunders had to shut me up in my little eating- 
 room by myself. 
 
 I remember with delight that room, with its 
 ceiled walls painted a dull blue ; its fireplace in 
 one corner, and opposite to it a triangular cup- 
 board. It w^as exquisitely neat, and had that 
 half-sadly suggestive air that all rooms have 
 which are shaped and furnished after the fash- 
 ions and usage of a past age. 
 
 The deacon's garden was the finest country- 
 garden I ever saw. It was half as large as his 
 orchard, and through it, from the back-door of 
 the house to the latter, ran a broad, straight 
 path. Two-thirds of it was taken up by green- 
 sward, in which stood a number of pear- and 
 cherry-trees. It was indeed a kind of vestibule 
 to the orchard, into which it opened by a gate. 
 Currant- and gooseberry-bushes grew along its 
 walls, and close by the gate was a great clump 
 of lilacs. The vegetable-beds were fringed 
 with flowers, and red and white rose-bushes 
 grew on either side of the broad path. Aspar- 
 agus was planted in a corner for its tender 
 green sprays, with which every Saturday Mrs. 
 Saunders filled her parlor fireplace. 
 
 Somebody was always at work in this gar- 
 
100 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 den. A head was sure to be bobbing up and 
 down somewhere in it. It was the storeroom 
 and resting-place of the house. I have never 
 seen such a phice for bees as it w^as. As if the 
 wild ones were not enough, the deacon must 
 go and plant a hive of them in a corner next 
 to the orchard, so that in midsummer there 
 was hardly a flower to be seen without a bee's 
 head buried in it. The Whitefield boys said 
 the bees were put in the garden to keep them 
 out. I should not wonder if it were so, for 
 a child could not thrust its arm throu2:h the 
 fence for a bunch of currants without having 
 half a dozen of them after its ears. 
 
 Another farmer whom I knew had a hive of 
 bees, which swarmed upon his hat while he 
 was weeding a carrot-bed. It was almost din- 
 ner-time and he was tired and hungry ; but he 
 did not dare to speak or move. His hat grew 
 heavy, and the rustle of the bees was like a 
 roar in his ears. He heard a clock strike twelve. 
 Somebody blew a tin horn at the back-door. 
 Dinner was ready. The horn made the bees 
 drop in strings from the brim of his hat like 
 a fringe. He heard his wife call "Peter! 
 Peter !" all over the house. Still, he was 
 afraid to speak. She went into the barn, calling 
 " Peter!" again, in a scared sort of way. He 
 had half a mind then to answer, but the bees 
 
DEACON SAUNDERS. 101 
 
 were getting a little uneasy. It seemed hours 
 to the farmer before the click of his garden- 
 gate told him that somebody was coming. Just 
 at that moment a string of bees dropped from 
 his hat's brim, and one or two of them rose 
 from its crown. Then the whole mass lifted, 
 and, with a whir and a whiz, went sailing over 
 apple-trees and orchard into a wood beyond ! 
 The bees were lost, but the farmer had gotten 
 not so much as a sting. For a long time after 
 this saucy boys had a way of asking him if 
 he had a bee in his hat. 
 
 Deacon Saunders's front-yard was as delight- 
 ful as his garden. I shall never forget its porch, 
 nor its terraces, full of rose-bushes, let down to 
 the street by an easy slant of unhewn, moss- 
 grown steps, nor yet the varied landscape be- 
 yond it. This porch, I am told, still stands, 
 somewhat disguised by paint, and the mossy 
 steps are said to have kept their integrity to 
 this day. The garden was, however, the most 
 changeful spot, with its successive crops of 
 vegetables and flowers. 
 
 Did you ever have an old-fashioned flower- 
 bed in a country-garden, — a long, narrow strip 
 of mellow earth, sown crosswise, in rows, with 
 various kinds of seeds ? You sprinkle these 
 seeds in little furrows, a foot apart, pat a thin 
 layer of earth over them, and wait. After a 
 
102 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 warm shower some late May mornincr yon find 
 your bed full of ridges, with here and there a 
 crack. In a few hours these cracks have run 
 along the ridges, and from them spring a host 
 of tiny leaves, most of them in pairs. You 
 can almost see them grow. Some shoot up 
 fast and are full of color; others lag and are 
 pale, and you sever them by a careless touch. 
 Such are the delight of bugs ; and there lurks 
 underneath them all a great, fat, sluggish 
 worm, ready to devour them. Be careful not 
 to confound weeds with your flowers. Pigweed 
 and chickweed and parsley are your vegetable 
 foes; although there is some excuse for the 
 last named in the fact that, when boiled, it 
 makes excellent greens. Worse than all else 
 are the hens, who love to burrow in soft, gar- 
 den mould. 
 
 If you find a toad in your bed let it stay, 
 for bugs and worms are its natural food. It 
 will grow fat and old in your service, and you 
 will learn to watch for its coming in the spring. 
 If it raises a family of toads, keep them too, 
 for they will do you much good and no harm. 
 I love to watch them on hot days, half buried, 
 and turning up their pulsating little throats and 
 twinkling eyes. 
 
 The Whitefield children declared that toads 
 gave people warts. I do not believe it ; but, lest 
 
DEACON SAUNDERS. 103 
 
 you may sometimes have warts, I will tell you 
 how they tried to cure them. The most com- 
 mon method Avas to rub them with a pea, and 
 then to throw the pea into a well. Another 
 way, quite as sure, was to cover them with the 
 juice of milkweed. It was often said that by 
 using certain magic words one could charm 
 warts from his own hands to the hands of an- 
 other. But those words I shall not tell you, 
 lest in an evil moment you may be guilty of 
 such wicked transplanting. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 FIRES. 
 
 Betsy had the reddest hair of any girl I 
 ever knew. It was quite short in front, and 
 she had a way of twisting it, on either temple, 
 into two little huttons, which she fastened with 
 pins. The rest of it she brought quite far up on 
 the top of her head, where she kept it in place 
 with a large-sized horn comb. Her face was 
 covered with freckles, and her eyes in winter 
 were apt to he inflamed. She always seemed to 
 have a mop in her hand, and she liad no respect 
 for paint. She was as neat as old Dame SaiFord 
 herself, and was continually " straightening 
 things out," as she called it. Her temper, 
 like her hair, was somewhat fiery ; and, when 
 her work did not suit her, she was prone to 
 a gloomy view of life. If she was to he be- 
 lieved, things were always " going to wrack 
 and ruin" about the house; and she had a 
 queer way of taking time by the forelock. In 
 the morning it was " going on to twelve 
 o'clock," and at noon it was " going on to 
 midnight." 
 
 lOi 
 
riRES. 105 
 
 She kept lier six kitclien chairs in a row on 
 one side of the room, and as many flatirons in 
 a line on the mantel-piece. Everything- where 
 she was had, she said, to " stand just so ;" and 
 woe to the child Avho carried crookedness into 
 her straight lines ! Betsy had a manner of her 
 own, and made a Avonderful kind of a courtesy, 
 with which her skirts pufted out all around like 
 a cheese. She always courtesied to Parson 
 Meeker when she met him, and said, " I hope 
 to see you well, sir." Once she courtesied in 
 a prayer-meeting to a man Avho offered her 
 a chair, and told him, in a shrill voice, to " keep 
 his setting," though she was " ever so much 
 obleeged" to him. This was when she was 
 under conviction, and Parson Meeker said he 
 thought she had met with a change of heart. 
 Farmer Lathem's wife hoped so too, for then 
 " there would be a chance of having some 
 Long-noses and Pudding-sweets left over in 
 the orchard." 
 
 It was in time of the long drouth, when 
 fire ran over Grayface, and a great comet 
 appeared in the sky. Some of the people of 
 Whitefield thought the world was coming to 
 an end. The comet stayed for weeks, visible 
 even at noonday, stretching its tail from the 
 zenith fixr towards the western horizon, and, 
 at niglit, staring in at windows with its eye 
 
106 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 of fire. It was the talk of the people, who 
 pondered over it with a lielpless wonder. I 
 recall two Whitefield Avomen as they stood 
 one morning, hare-armed in a doorway, star- 
 ing at and chattering ahout it. One says they 
 might " as well stop work" and "" take it 
 easy" while they can. The other thinks the 
 better way is to "keep on a stiddj^ jog until it 
 comes." They wish they knew '' how near it 
 is," and " Avhatthe tail means anj^way." 
 
 Betsy comes along with a pail, which she 
 sets down, and then looks up to the comet. 
 The air is dense with smoke from Grayface, 
 and the dry earth is full of cracks. 
 
 Betsy declares that it is "going on two 
 months since there has been any rain." 
 Everything is "going to wrack and ruin;" 
 and " if that tiling up there should burst, 
 there'll be an end to Whitetield." 
 
 Then she catches sight of me, listening, 
 wide-mouthed, and she tells me that I needn't 
 suppose she is " going home to iron m}^ pink 
 muslin," for she thinks the tail of the comet 
 " has started, and is coming right down to 
 whisk it off from the line." I believed her, 
 and distinctly remember the terror that took 
 hold of me as I rushed home and tore the 
 pink muslin from the line, lest it sliould be 
 Avhisked off by the comet's tail. 
 
FIRES. 107 
 
 When the drouth broke, a single day's rain 
 washed all the smoke from tlie air. Directly 
 the tail of the comet began to fade, and all of 
 a sudden its fiery eye went out of the sky. 
 
 Some of the villagers thought it had " burst," 
 others that it had " burnt out." Bets}^ said, 
 "Whatever it was, it was a humbug;" and 
 the wisest man in Whitefield could neither 
 tell whence it came nor whither it went. One 
 thing, however, was certain, — Farmer Lathem 
 said that never, since his orchard began to 
 bear, had he gathered such a crop of apples 
 as he did, despite the drouth, in the year of 
 the great comet. 
 
 Any exceptional motion of the elements 
 makes a deep impression in the country. 
 Freaks of lightning, the burning of buildings, 
 freshets, whatever is out of its usual course, 
 stirs up its inhabitants. Passing through the 
 shaded street of Whitefield Corner, Avhosc 
 quiet is so profound that the buzzing of an in- 
 sect catches the ear of a lounger, one can hardly 
 realize how such things affect its indwellers. 
 
 A store burned once at midnio'ht in this 
 village. The darkness was intense, and rain 
 fell in torrents. I remember how I was 
 awakened by a strange sound. I heard the 
 pouring rain, and the swollen waters of Saf- 
 ford's brook sullenly roared. Through these 
 
108 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 natural voices pierced a needle-sharp cry, be- 
 gun at the far end of the village, coming 
 nearer, taken up in chorus, and suddenly ring- 
 ing out with a fearful distinctness, — 
 
 " Fire !— fire !— fire !'' 
 
 As if by magic, every man in the place 
 was out upon the street and caught up the cry. 
 Women and children stood, Avith faces flat- 
 tened against panes, vainly staring out into a 
 darkness blacker than the smoke which had 
 begun to filter through the cracks of doors and 
 w^indows. The uproar grew louder, and horns 
 were blown. There w^as a crazy old belfry 
 where the village spire now is, but there was 
 no bell in it. 
 
 " "What is it V' the women called out through 
 the storm, and here and there an answer was 
 shouted back, " It is Doe's store, and there is 
 powder in the cellar." 
 
 A gleam of light came at the corner, where 
 two roads meet, and a great tongue of flame 
 leaped up into the sky, bringing out the old 
 belfry like a skeleton, and men were seen run- 
 ning wildly about the street. They had no 
 buckets, for the rain poured and poured, and 
 the powder kept them away from the store. 
 
 The fire had caught near the roof, which 
 first burned through. Then the flames went 
 boring down into the sale-room. When they 
 
FIRES. 109 
 
 had lighted up the lower windows, making a 
 ghastly show of the motley goods w^ithin, men 
 and hoj's went flying away and all cries ceased. 
 Everybody was w^aiting for something. The 
 flames licked up the goods, broke through the 
 windows, and, as if the little village Avas not 
 red enough, fed upon rum and oil. Suddenly 
 a compact stream of sparks shot far above the 
 old belfry, and with it came a dull roar, which 
 shook the whole village. The fire had gotten at 
 the powder. Women and children screamed, 
 but the men rushed out and, strange to say, 
 began to cry " fire" again. 
 
 The mischief, however, was over. Much 
 glass had been broken and brands flung about. 
 Men, forming in a line, passed pails of water 
 from hand to hand, and, with help of the rain, 
 quenched whatever had kindled. The glare 
 died out of the sky, and, save a little sullen 
 glow behind the belfry at the Corner, the night 
 went back into its darkness. 
 
 It was hard for the scared and drenched vil- 
 lagers to return again to quiet and sleep, but 
 they did it ; and in hardly more than an hour 
 after the explosion one could hear only the 
 splashing of the rain and the roar of Saflbrd's 
 brook. The next day there Avas left to remind 
 one of the past night's tumult only a thin, 
 feebly curling smoke from a heap of embers, 
 
110 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 which children Avere poking over with sticks. 
 This fire, however, did not pass from the mem- 
 ory of the village children. In a city a whole 
 block might have burned and, save for the 
 trmidling past of engines, not an outside 
 sleeper would have stirred. But in the little 
 village of Whitefield Corner every fold and 
 freak of the fire-fiend were held in memory by 
 its terrified inhabitants. They brooded over 
 the scene and talked about it. They passed 
 over to their children from year to year the 
 story of the burning of Doe's store, with 
 powder in its cellar, until it was as much to 
 the village as the great fire was to London. 
 
 There was a seam in the top of the old 
 belfry, made by lightning, which was seen by 
 Dame Saffbrd to fall upon it like a ball of fire. 
 ISTot long afterwards a man with lightning-rods 
 for sale stopped in the village, and one of 
 them would have been put upon the belfry 
 had not old Farmer Lathem declared that to 
 his mind lightning-rods were " humbugs." 
 He said, '' I have lived in Whitefield going on 
 seventy years, and the first house has yet to 
 be burned in it by lightning.'' He looked 
 upon chimneys as *' about the best things for 
 lightning to run down on ;" and, if folks were 
 " skeery," they could " kiver themselves up 
 in feather beds." '' The strangest case of 
 
FIRES. Ill 
 
 strikinsr" he had ever known was that of his 
 brother John's wife, who, sitting by an open 
 window in a shower, " had lier voice knocked 
 straight out of lier by a streak of lightning 
 and never got it back again." But it might 
 have been worse. *' You have no idee," he 
 said, "how agreeable a dumb woman can be." 
 lie wound up by declaring that, " for one," 
 he was " asrin the lifrhtnino:-rod." 
 
 Whitefield was famous for its heavy showers. 
 In how many hot July and August afternoons 
 have I seen a bank of fleecy clouds hanging 
 over the summit of Eed Mountain take on 
 lurid edges, grow dark, stretch along the hor- 
 izon, and spread into the zenith. Working- 
 men stop to eye them, and say to each other, 
 "A shower is coining up." The schoolmis- 
 tress puts her head far out of a window, 
 turning it this way and that, and tells her 
 scholars they had "better run home, for it 
 begins to lighten." There is a hurrying and 
 scurrying among the village women, who 
 are carrying " things in out of the rain." 
 
 When a storm-cloud broke over Whitefield 
 Corner, its thunder went echoing in and out 
 the ridges of Ked Mountain and Gray face 
 and their fellows like the roar of artillery. 
 It seems to me that I have never heard any 
 ffound more solemn than the long-continued 
 
112 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 rumbling and muttering in the night-time of 
 thunder among the outlying hills of "White- 
 field. Somebody told me, when I was a very 
 little child, that it was God's voice, and I be- 
 lieved it. This gave me no fear. Instead, it 
 filled me with a tender awe. How vividly I 
 remember my often-repeated storm-worship, 
 the conditions of which were peculiar, I 
 think, to the mountainous locality of White- 
 field ! When a near shower had spent its 
 force it seemed to be continually repeating 
 itself elsewhere. The thunder, with a muffled 
 roll, followed the march of its clouds. When 
 it grew deep and long, I knew that it must be 
 far away ; and as it was dying out, I recall a 
 certain indescribable, delicious sadness of low, 
 prolonged sound, out of which I used to drift 
 into the utter silence of sleep. 
 
 Often the storm-cloud " passed over," as the 
 villagers used to say ; and then it was apt to 
 " burst" near the little pond just outside the 
 village, the shore of which was bounded by 
 the old graveyard and the farm of Deacon 
 Saunders. This pond had such a name for 
 ^' drawing lightning" that, whenever a very 
 loud clap of thunder came, people would 
 wonder if something in the Saunders iNTeigh- 
 borhood had not been struck. The chimney 
 of the deacon's house was jagged on one side ; 
 
FIRES. 113 
 
 and, for many years, several bricks lay loose 
 upon its roof. Cliildren pointed with pride 
 to these as havins; been there ever since the 
 house was struck by lightning. The old 
 deacon told them how he, sitting in the 
 kitchen at the time, was stunned, and his 
 wife, who was knitting not far from him, had 
 numbness in her hands for several days after. 
 The lightning followed the chimney into the 
 cellar, where it played a few pranks, and then 
 went ploughing into the earth. 
 
 In a field not far from the house was a great, 
 one-sided elm. Half of it had been torn off 
 by lightning ; and the tree had healed with a 
 ragged, deep-set scar. The deacon's best pair 
 of oxen were standing under the tree when 
 it was struck, fastened together by a yoke, 
 which was much burned. The oxen were 
 instantly killed; and, strange to say, though 
 their heads, in front of the yoke, were roasted, 
 not a hair of them on the other side was 
 singed. Farmer Latliem said he had never 
 seen a '* neater job of cooking." 
 
 I w^as once caught in the deacon's house by 
 a shower. I hear him now calling to his men, 
 " Hurry up, for there is a heavy thunder-cloud 
 over the top of Red Mountain, and it is coming 
 fast this way !" His wife repeats to me, " A 
 heavy shower is coming over the top of Red 
 
114 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 Mountain, and you must stay, child, until it is 
 over." 
 
 I shall never forget that shower; its pre- 
 ceding hush and gloom, followed by a deluge 
 and o'lare and the continued crashins: of thun- 
 der. Once we thought the chimney had been 
 struck again, and the deacon went up into the 
 garret. . At the same time his wife, looking 
 out of the window, spied the shivered elm and 
 the oxen lying under it, half buried in green 
 branches. The rain poured, and slackened 
 only to gather fresh fur}^ Our eyes were 
 half blinded with lightning, and all sensation 
 seemed swallowed up in sound. This thunder- 
 storm, like the burning of Doe's store, was re- 
 membered as an epoch in the history of White- 
 field. Every shower that came afterwards was 
 " nothing to the one in which Deacon Saun- 
 ders's oxen were killed under an elm-tree." 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PARSON MEEKER. 
 
 Parson Meeker was treated with great re- 
 spect by the viUage chiklren. The boys took 
 off their caps and the girls dropped a courtesy 
 Avhen they met him, although, I am sorry to 
 say, such was their awe of him, that the cry 
 " Parson Meeker's coming !" was apt to send 
 them flying into lanes and flelds. He had a 
 way of stopping children and talking to them 
 which ought to have made saints of them all, 
 but they did not seem to like it. Betsy said 
 one day that it was "just a waste of breath," 
 — that he " might as well talk to the winds;" 
 for the children of Whitefield, if the " hook- 
 ing of pears and apples" was stealing, were 
 " born thieves." 
 
 Parson Meeker called himself a Grahamite. 
 Most of the children thought a Grahamite was 
 a tall, thin person, who wore spectacles and a 
 white neckcloth, and whose business it was to 
 keep them out of mischief. Betsy told me it 
 meant a " spleeny man," who ate no meat, and 
 
 115 
 
116 OLDTTME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 was " notliin but a rack of bones." ]^o mat- 
 ter how much the parson's abstinence from 
 meat may have abated his weight, it took 
 nothing from his length of daj^s. ^o stranger 
 could have failed to know him as the minister 
 of the village ; not so much because of his 
 white neckcloth as of his unaffected air of 
 piety, which almost gave him the look of apol- 
 ogizing for being in this wicked world at all. 
 He was without guile, walking in and out his 
 blameless way, preaching as much by the pu- 
 rity of his daily life as by his sermons. Gen- 
 tle of manner and wise of speech; slow to 
 take offence, but ready always to rebuke sin; 
 like the good old doctor of East Eoad, he was 
 held up as an example to sons, who were ex- 
 horted by their mothers to " grow up to be as 
 good as Parson Meeker." His name and his 
 influence can never die out of Whitefield. 
 
 Every Sunday he preached two long ser- 
 mons, each with five heads, and each head 
 itself divided. After the fifthly came an 
 application, with an exhortation at its close. 
 The sermons were called very able, or more 
 often " strong discourses." I used to think 
 this was because Mrs. Meeker had stitched 
 their leaves fast together. Betsy said they 
 were just like Deacon Saunders's "breaking- 
 up plough," and went " tearing right through 
 
PARSON MEEKER. 117 
 
 sin." The pnrson, wlicu I knew liim, was a 
 little slow of speech and dull of sight. He 
 sometimes lost his place on his page. IIow 
 afraid I used to be lest, not finding it, he should 
 repeat his heads ! He always brought himself 
 up with a jerk, however, and sailed safely 
 through to the application. When that came 
 Benny almost always gave me a jog with his 
 elbow or foot. Once he stuck a pin into my 
 arm, which made me jump so that Deacon 
 Saunders, who sat behind, waked up with a 
 loud snort. The deacon was alwavs talkino; 
 about the sermons being "powerful in doc- 
 trine." When Benny asked Betsy what doc- 
 trines were, she told him to " let doctrines 
 alone;" that they were " pisen things, only fit 
 for hardened old sinners." 
 
 The parson's congregation, not large in 
 summer, was very small in winter. The meet- 
 ing-house was warmed in cold weather by two 
 large stoves, fed with green wood, which sel- 
 dom got well kindled before the sermon be- 
 gan, and, if Betsy was to be believed, many 
 worshippers had " caught their death-a-colds" 
 in spite of them. The stoves stood in front 
 of two doors, and their funnels, running the 
 length of the aisles to the .chimney behind, 
 were strung at their joints with tin-pails, to 
 catch the acid which dripped througli them. 
 
118 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 The pretty girls of Whitefield, especially when 
 they had gotten new hats or cloaks, used to 
 stop before the stoves to warm. 
 
 In summer, with its wide-open windows and 
 doors, the meeting-house was a pleasant place 
 for children, Avho through them drowsily 
 watched the outlying world. So unvarying 
 was the congregation that a new-comer made 
 a stir, and any disturbance of the service was 
 much talked over afterwards. 
 
 In the middle of a sermon one summer's 
 day a strange man drove w^ildly up to one of 
 the meeting-house doors, and, jumping out 
 upon its threshold, called out with a loud 
 voice, — 
 
 " Is Doctor Jones present ?" 
 
 Deacon Saunders stood up in his pew and 
 said, "He is not." 
 
 Then the man wanted to know if there was 
 a storekeeper in the house. This time two 
 men rose, and the stranger asked if cither of 
 them had any paregoric, adding that his 
 brother was very sick. 
 
 One of them, who had a harelip, answered 
 as well as he could, " I keep paregoric," and 
 went down the aisle to the man in the door, 
 who took him into his wagon and drove off 
 very fast to the corner, where the stores were. 
 This all came to j)ass so quickly that tlie chil- 
 
PARSON MEEKER. 119 
 
 dreii never tliougbt to laugh ; and wlicn the 
 man flew past again with his paregoric, they 
 were still wide-mouthed with wonder, while 
 the parson had but just found his place in his 
 sermon. 
 
 This sounds queerlj, hut it happened more 
 than forty years ago, in the meeting-house at 
 Whitefield Corner; and the sickness of the 
 brother of that strange man from Boston, wlio 
 thus invaded its worship, was the talk of the 
 village women for several weeks. They never 
 rested until they found out what ailed the 
 patient, how soon the doctor got to him, and 
 whether the paregoric did him any good. 
 
 ]S"ow and then Farmer Lathem's little dog, 
 which on Sundays was always shut into a 
 shed, would get out and follow his owner to 
 church; but he did no more than to eye the 
 people curiously from the doorway, and then 
 at a shake of his master's head would trot 
 home again. Once only he concluded to come 
 in, and perched himself in one of the chairs in 
 front of the pulpit, where he looked so sur- 
 prised that everybody laughed. Parson Meeker 
 stopped in the middle of his sermon, and said 
 he was " sorry to see signs of levity in the con- 
 gregation ;" and then Farmer Lathem snapped 
 his fingers at the dog, who jumped down and 
 followed him out of the meeting: -house. Alariire 
 
120 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 striped snake one Sunday crawled tliroiigli an 
 entry into one of the aisles, and the people 
 who saw it buttoned the doors of their pews. 
 The parson looked over the top of his spectacles 
 and frowned: there was such a rustle on that 
 side of the meeting-house ; but it stopped di- 
 rectly, for the snake glided out just as it came. 
 The next day all the boys in Whitefield Cor- 
 ner might have been seen poking under the 
 meeting-house steps with sticks and stopping 
 up their chinks with stones. 
 
 The men who were church members took 
 care of the meeting-house by turns, and once 
 a year all the hard-Avorking women of the vil- 
 lasre turned out to clean it. Durino; the sum- 
 mer spiders spun their w^ebs on its windows 
 unmolested, and caught flies to the amusement 
 of children. Now and then a bumble-bee flew 
 in through the open windows and buzzed un- 
 comfortably near their heads; and one summer 
 a nest of wasps, somewhere back of the meet- 
 ing-house, bothered its worshippers. One of 
 them got inside the sleeve of a young girl and 
 made a stir in the singing seats. 
 
 The first meeting-house of the tow^n, which 
 was followed by the one at the Corner, stood 
 close by the pond of the Saunders iTeighbor- 
 hood, almost surrounded by ancient pines. Its 
 situation, elsewhere imperfectly described by 
 
PARSON MEEKER. 121 
 
 me, was of surpassing beauty. It had ceased 
 to be used as a place of worship in my child- 
 hood, when boys and girls hunted for birds' 
 nests amono:st its ruins. It was one of the 
 quaintest of its kind, with a huge sounding- 
 board and a railed platform built up in its centre 
 for siniirers. I do not believe the oldest resident 
 of the Corner could exactly tell what became 
 of the timbers of this ancient meeting-house. 
 Bricks there were none, for it had no chimney. 
 After its desertion for the more populous village 
 site it gradually fell apart, until, as in the case 
 of the old pound, before anybody thought of it, 
 its bared foundation, which adjoined the burial- 
 place, had been given up to new-made graves. 
 It has still, however, a phantom existence; 
 and, keeping alive its shape and its uses. White- 
 field people love to talk of " the old meeting- 
 house." 
 
 The road from it led by an casj' slant to the 
 summit of a liill, which overlooked the Cor- 
 ner, and on which lived a doctor as famous in 
 the town as was the skilful surgeon in East 
 Koad. His wife, who had a witty tongue, was 
 very kind to the poor, and was deft with her 
 needle. Her two little girls wore ruffled tiers 
 and pink sun-bonnets, and were envied by many 
 children. Down the hill, which in winter was 
 much clogged by snow, Moses used in summer 
 
122 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 to drive liis stage at a furious rate. "When a 
 great clatter was heard by the Corner people, 
 they said, " The stage is coming down the 
 doctor's hill." 
 
 His great house has had a sharp gahle 
 mounted on its square roof, and has been 
 stripped of its weather-stained shingles. In- 
 deed, the thing has been born again, out of a 
 venerable, stately old age, into the aspect of an 
 aggressive youth, and this is why I go back to 
 the simple incidents of its past. Too simple ! 
 perhaps you ^2^j. Still, I think any thirsty 
 old traveller may be suffered for a little, on the 
 dusty highway of life, to indulge in that harm- 
 less, childish delirium which comes from dal- 
 lying with the ghosts of things which belonged 
 to his 3'outh. 
 
 How long ago those summer Sundays seem ! 
 Their delight was a real thing, not an after- 
 creation of fancy. There was one service, too, 
 seldom given, which I would travel very far to 
 take part in. It was when a tankard and four 
 cups, not of silver, but scoured bright, with a 
 spotless cover over them, stood on the little 
 table in front of the pulpit in the meeting- 
 house at "Whitefield Corner. The parson came 
 and sat on one side of the table, and the mild- 
 eyed deacon sat on the other. The twain lifted 
 the covering, and the parson, having asked 
 
PAIiSOX MEEKER. 123 
 
 those who were in good and regular stand- 
 ing with Christian churches to commune with 
 them, said, "Let us praj-." The house was 
 hushed, and, when tlie deacon took up his 
 office, the dropping of a pin coukl he heard. 
 I see and hear it all : the scattered hut ohserv- 
 ant worshippers ; the little company in front ; 
 the children curious and awe-struck; the hright 
 outer world; the silence, hroken only by the 
 slow tread of the deacon. I used to think, 
 and I think now, that there can he no more 
 solemn gathering than of the little hand which, 
 in the quiet and beauty of that open village 
 church, led by their devout, trembling, old 
 minister, communed in spirit in the very ves- 
 tibule of the unseen world. 
 
 The parson had a daughter, Margaret by 
 name, whose young life, cut off in its early 
 bloom, was so bright and comely while it 
 lasted, that the story of it is to this day help- 
 ful and sweet to the young girls of Whitefield. 
 She passed away by a slow and sure consump- 
 tion, bred, perhaps, by the altitude of White- 
 field, which is perched in a stratum of upper 
 air. She had great eyes, wdth a far-away look; 
 and when she came into the meeting-house all 
 the young people watched her, because she was 
 so stately. There was hardly anything sug- 
 gestive of decay about her illness. She walked 
 
124 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 lier beautiful wa}^, loving and beloved. By 
 and by she gradually withdrew herself, but 
 was still to be found at home, gracious as ever. 
 Then one day she lay down and never rose 
 asiain. 
 
 After the second service came the Sabbath- 
 school. It began at five o'clock in summer 
 and held in to the gloaming. It w^as made up 
 of the village children gathered in the meet- 
 ing-house, who recited in monotone long pas- 
 sages from the J^ew Testament. They re- 
 peated the beatitudes, the beautiful parables, 
 and that sweetest and saddest of all stories. 
 Classes sat in pews far apart all over the meet- 
 ing-house, and were prompted mostly by 
 ^vomen, who were very particular about their 
 recitations, and insisted that all the little words 
 should be put in their right places. 
 
 Deacon Saunders, who taught a class of boys, 
 explained the verses to them ; and he was so 
 learned that Benny, wdio w^as one of them, 
 could not understand the meaning of half he 
 said. My teacher was the handsomest woman 
 in the school. The girls all looked up to her, 
 for she had a sister in Boston, and lived in the 
 largest house in the village, with a front-yard 
 full of lilacs. The scholars were all fond of 
 flowers, and almost every child brought a posy 
 of some kind. To this day I recall the pang 
 
PARSON MEEKER. 125 
 
 of envy with which, one Sunda}^, I watched a 
 white daffodil, hekl in the hand of a little girl 
 who sat in the pew next me. 
 
 The parson always came to the school, and 
 taught a Bihle-class in the singing seats, 
 where the slanting sunheams streamed across 
 his ao^cd head. 
 
 The verses recited hy the several classes 
 "svere not the same, but heard from without, 
 they mingled together as if uttered by one 
 voice. The deacon pitched a tune, the parson 
 took it up, teachers and scholars joined in ; 
 and this music, unskilled though it was, was 
 mellowed by the outer air. So also was the 
 tremulous prayer that came after. 
 
 Sometimes a farmer, going past wdth his 
 cows, mio-ht be heard callino- to them with a 
 loud " hurrup," but nobody laughed. When 
 daylight began to fade out of the room, all 
 babble of tongues would cease, and the little 
 band dispersed, each going his and her own 
 way, the teacher and the taught, all made 
 better by what the}^ had seen and heard. 
 
 Generally, upon coming out of the school, 
 the parson's horse might be found quietly 
 grazing on the meeting-house green. He 
 was an uneasy creature, always trying, when 
 hitched, to slip oft' his blinders, and chewing 
 away at his post. Spike, the blacksmith, dc- 
 
126 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 dared he was the hardest horse to keep in 
 shoes he ever knew. Betsy said he was lame 
 in one shoulder and blind of an eye. He 
 had, to be sure, so many unusual qualities that 
 the village children stood quite in awe of him. 
 He was, however, a most harmless beast, which 
 pastured by the roadside, and, being of a light 
 gray, loomed up in a weird way on dark 
 nights, ^ext to the great rock in the edge of 
 Lathem's wood he made the best ghost in 
 town, and boys and girls were in the habit of 
 saying, when at night a gray object thrust 
 itself out of shadow upon their sight, — 
 " Pooh ! it's only the parson's horse." 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 ONE GALA-DAY. 
 
 I AM at a loss how to do justice to Mrs. 
 Meeker, for, with her trained mind, her pure 
 heart, and her fine manners, the parson's earn- 
 est wife seemed to me quite a perfect~\voman. 
 She was not handsome, but the viUage chil- 
 dren were much in awe of her looks. I never 
 knew a woman with a more stately expression 
 than hers. When I read of Eoman matrons 
 I always think of ^Irs. Meeker. Her features 
 were marked and her eyes of deepest blue. 
 She wore her hair combed closely down over 
 her ears, so that her forehead seemed to run 
 up in a point high upon her head. Its color 
 was of reddish-brown, and, I am sorry to say, 
 so far as it was seen, it was not her own. It 
 was called a scratch, and Betsy said Mrs. 
 Meeker " would look enous-h sio-ht better if 
 she would leave it off." AYlietber any hair at 
 all grew upon Mrs. Meeker's head was a great 
 problem with the village children, and nothing 
 could better illustrate the dignity of this 
 
 127 
 
128 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 woman than the fact that for more than thirty 
 years a whole neighborhood tried in vain to 
 find out. 
 
 She was rarely well educated for those times, 
 and her language, though somewhat stiff, was 
 always choice. Her voice was peculiar, a little 
 cold perhaps, like her eyes, but agreeable. 
 When she began to speak, it was with a sort 
 of hitch like a slight cough, which I have 
 known young people to copy. She came into 
 church late with the parson and sat in a pew 
 which faced most of the congregation. She 
 was almost as motionless through the sermon 
 as if made of stone, and her eyes fell upon 
 uneasy children like an ice-bath. 
 
 She taught a little school in winter. It was 
 held in an upper chamber of the parson's 
 house, where six tables were ranged around 
 the wall, with twice as many chairs before 
 them. Her scholars were chosen from well- 
 to-do families, and were flattered by being 
 thought worthy of companionship with the 
 parson's children. Sometimes the parson him- 
 self helped her at her task, and, with all due 
 respect to his memory, I must say that she was 
 the better teacher of the two. She gave lec- 
 tures almost every day upon behavior, which 
 made the atmosphere of the school a little 
 bracing. Her advice would have sounded 
 
ONE GALA-DAY. 129 
 
 well if written in a Look, but some of it was 
 hard to be followed by lively country children. 
 The consequence was that her scholars came 
 to have two sets of manners, one set pecu- 
 liar to themselves, the other suited to Mrs. 
 Sleeker. Her own deportment was the best 
 of its kind. Even her scratch became it. She 
 was exacting of courtesy and her stateliness 
 never forsook her. She was so cramped by 
 circumstance that her lot was somewhat of a 
 missionary one. Her nature was so exalted 
 that it left its indelible imprint upon a Avhole 
 generation in Whitefield. 
 
 I have ni}^ liveliest recollection of Mrs. 
 Meeker as she looked marching in a proces- 
 sion one Fourth of July, to a grove just out- 
 side of the village ; a day past more than forty 
 years, but come down through the memory of 
 its older inhabitants. In Lathem's pasture, 
 just outside his wood, was a grove of sugar- 
 maples, much honeycombed by tapping. Here 
 the day was to be celebrated. For a week 
 previous the weather was the chief subject of 
 talk in the village. It rained the day before 
 the Fourth, and all through its weary hours 
 Whitefield Corner children watched the clouds 
 in the sky. Just at sunset these began to lift 
 from the crown of Red Mountain, and all at 
 once the sun came out and went down Avith 
 
130 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 promise of a fair day on tlie morrow. The 
 little children all came runnins; out from their 
 houses like bees from a hive, so glad were they 
 that the sun had " set clear." 
 
 A long table beneath the maple-trees was 
 covered with a white cloth bordered by oak- 
 leaves deftly woven. Young men and maid- 
 ens brought evergreens and flowers, and the 
 spot blossomed like a garden. Dishes were 
 lent by the village women. ^N'o art of cook- 
 ery was left untried. Tarts and doughnuts 
 and cakes of all kinds were heaped alongside 
 chickens and cold meats. Under a tree, in a 
 wagon, was a washtub, drawn thither by the 
 calico-horse, who, tied to a stake, quietly 
 munched the grass under his nose. This tub 
 was full of lemonade, which Betsy was to 
 deal out to thirsty youngsters with a long- 
 handled dipper. 
 
 The three storekeepers had sent sweetmeats 
 from the stale contents of brass-mouthed jars 
 — sticks of candy, red and white hearts, and 
 striped " Gibraltars" (whence this name ?). 
 
 It was an enticing spot, with its massive old 
 maples, its outlying fringe of woods, the far- 
 off mountains, the near village, its quiet, its 
 sunshine, and its accidental, quaint garnishing. 
 
 The people first came together in the meet- 
 ing-house; the parson, the doctor, and the 
 
ONE GALA-DAY. 131 
 
 two lawyers, witli tlicir wives, and tlie other 
 citizens, all in best attire. The girls were 
 mostly in white, with Line ribbon aronnd 
 their necks, and all the boys had been sheared 
 for the occasion. 
 
 The parson made a long prayer, and then 
 the procession formed, the villagers falling into 
 appropriate position according to age and that 
 fine instinct of precedence peculiar to country- 
 people. The smaller children went first, and 
 at the head of all the women marched Mrs. 
 Meeker. She wore a crimson shawl that day 
 (I remember it distinctly), and her two little 
 boys blue jackets with bright buttons. They 
 looked very fine to me — she with her stately 
 manner, and all three with their gay raiment. 
 The procession marched through the village to 
 music of drum and fife, kept straight by a 
 proud-looking marshal with a red sash around 
 his waist and a badge on his collar. Little 
 Benny lay very ill in a darkened room that 
 day. When the villagers passed by his win- 
 dow the music was stopped, but nobody 
 thought he was going to die. Looking back- 
 wards, liow many people find that in some of 
 their lightest moments they have walked 
 abreast of an unrevealed tragedy ! 
 
 It was a pretty sight : the entire population 
 of the village turned out for a holiday — a holi- 
 
132 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 day not foolish, but, instead, a rational and re- 
 freshing break into the sameness of a qniet 
 living. As a picture seen through the perspec- 
 tive of forty years it is delightful. The bare- 
 headed girls looked very sweet with their 
 white dresses and blue ribbons, and most of 
 the boys were sprucerthan they had ever been 
 before. When the line turned through the 
 gap which had been made in the wall into 
 Lathem's pasture, bringing the great men of 
 the day into full view, it would have been hard 
 for many of the marchers behind them to be- 
 lieve that there could be a grander occasion 
 than the small pageant of that summer's day. 
 At the gap the marshal stopped (how splen- 
 did he looked !), and waved his baton over the 
 children's heads, who filed in and sat down in 
 front of the table, with their fothers and 
 mothers behind them. The musicians and 
 orators had seats at the head of the table upon 
 a platform built under a tree. With them sat 
 two aged pensioners, survivors of the Revolu- 
 tion. The oration was by the town's best 
 law^yer, and the " Declaration" was read by a 
 loud-voiced young man with so much empha- 
 sis and gesture that Farmer Lathem said it 
 was the " eloquentest speech" he had ever 
 heard in his life. He thought " a fellow able 
 to talk like that ought to be made gove'nor." 
 
ONE GALA-DAY. 133 
 
 After grace from the parson the cliilclren's 
 turn came. IIow hungry they were ! Betsy 
 said it " beat all natur' " to see the " critters 
 cat." She knew they had fasted for a week. 
 
 When the repast had ended, matrons as- 
 sorted tlieir dishes, young men and maidens 
 loitered in Lathem's wood, and little children 
 frolicked about at will. It was a peaceful, 
 profitable day. For a few short hours rest 
 had joined hands with labor, and such finer 
 instincts as were encrusted by a life of toil liad 
 come out to meet the sunshine of a holiday. 
 I think the fathers and mothers were as sorry 
 as their children to have it end, for they looked 
 surprised when the marshal with beating of 
 drum summoned the loiterers back from Lath- 
 em's woods. 
 
 How vividly the scene comes back to me ! — 
 the woods ringing with laughter, the white 
 frocks of the girls set off by its verdure ; men, 
 unused to rest, lounging upon the pasture- 
 knolls; serious matrons, unbending to the 
 mood of the day; the old pensioners, on their 
 high perch, crowned with maple leaves; the 
 parson and the orators amused, but with a 
 certain dignity to maintain, — over and around 
 all the unclouded brightness of a summer's 
 day. I remember how the stage, when it went 
 by, stopped in the road, while its passengers 
 
134 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 liurralied ut us, and all other travellers curi- 
 ously eyed us. Quaint, homely picture, but 
 heartsome and painted indelibly upon Lath- 
 em's pasture. 
 
 I think the ending of the day was the sweet- 
 est part of it. It was touched with that sad- 
 ness which always marks the Inpse of a happy 
 To-day into a remembrance called Yesterday. 
 People were slow to start, and the old pen- 
 sioners seemed rooted to their seats. AVhen at 
 last the procession re-formed, the drum and 
 bugle Avere silent, but every man, woman, and 
 child chose the companions they liked best; 
 and, by pairs, slowly marched towards the vil- 
 lage. At the gap in the wall the marshal again 
 waved his baton, and they separated into two 
 lines, through which the pensioners passed. The 
 old men, tired by the day's festivities, stared 
 about them with half vacant ej'es. They were 
 driven in an open chariot, and I dare say that 
 never in their whole lives had they been so 
 royally cared for. 
 
 When the procession marched from the 
 maple grove the sun was two hours high in 
 the west. People loitered outside their doors, 
 and talked over the day's incidents ^vith each 
 other, dreading to let go their hold upon such 
 harmless diversions. A few little boys strag- 
 gled back to the grove, where women were 
 
ONE GALA-DAY. 135 
 
 taking away the remnants of the feast. Tlie 
 tables and stage were already being demolislied, 
 and the innocent show, which, while it lasted, 
 was graced by, and gave grace to, the land- 
 scape had already become a thing of the past. 
 The actors in it, at approach of dusk, were 
 absorbed into their homes ; and then, for a 
 little, there was left of that gala-day a faint, 
 purple glow on the edge of the horizon. Its 
 brightness, however, had not died out of peo- 
 ple's hearts. The little girls packed away their 
 white frocks and blue ribbons, the men and 
 women went back to their tasks, but some- 
 thing immortal had gone into their lives — the 
 glory of one care-free and joyful day. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 BOWDY-PLACE. 
 
 ±)0Wdy-Place was so called from an old 
 house built by a man named Bowdj. It is 
 surprising liow long a deserted house will cling 
 to a landscape in the country. This one had 
 been doorless and windowless for years, and 
 it was the delight of children, who prowled 
 about it fearless of the ghosts which did really 
 dwell in it. All houses in which people have 
 lived are full of ghosts. These are the noise- 
 less, busy memories of past days, which make 
 the dead live, the dumb speak, and formless 
 and faded things take shape and color. Every 
 aspect of a decaying house in the country is 
 beautiful. When it has begun to totter, with 
 slanting sides and sunken roof, I^ature by de- 
 grees absorbs it; so that what we call "rot" 
 is only the melting awa^' of the skeleton of a 
 home into the bosom of the earth. 
 
 The grave of an old house always makes me 
 sad. You can never mistake one, — a hollow in 
 a field or pasture, full of berry-bushes and lush 
 
 13G 
 
BOWDY-PLACE. 137 
 
 weeds, the soil red Avith crumbled bricks, a 
 few ragged apple-trees near by, and, perhaps, 
 a well full of rocks. So Ions: as such sio-ns re- 
 main no house can be said to have been wholly 
 hewed or burned or rotted down. Something 
 from it has stayed behind, something stronger 
 than frame-work or finishing. Until some 
 thrifty farmer, then, shall fill up and plough 
 over the cellar of Bowdy house, the field in 
 which it is must bear the name of Bowdy- 
 Place. 
 
 In my day this field was famous for its wild 
 strawberries. The Whitefield children used to 
 say that they \vere to be found there " as big 
 as thimbles." Did you ever go after wild 
 strawberries ? If you never have, start straight 
 for the low-lying meadows, yellow with butter- 
 cups. They are not to be found in fields, full 
 of stout herds-grass and grain. Tlie straw- 
 berry is shy, and hides away in rock-heaps 
 and along walls. It loves old things and takes 
 root in unused fields and pastures. It has a 
 savage streak, and plants itself about jagged 
 stumps in " burnt" and newly-broken ground, 
 where it grows tall with a strong, red stem ; 
 and, because it gets the first fat of the soil, 
 bears sweet, well-rounded fruit. In patches of 
 spindling grass it throws up long stalks, Avith 
 a juicy berry, Avhich hangs over like a head 
 10 
 
138 OLDTIME CHILDLJFE. 
 
 too big for its body. Sweetest strawberries 
 are, however, to be found in fields of short, 
 seldom-uprooted grass, where the plant crawls 
 about rocks and clings to the earth with pale- 
 red tendrils. Here the berries shrink in size, 
 but delight the eater by their flavor. Indeed, 
 there are so many kinds that I despair, without 
 leading you by the hand, of making a first-class 
 strawberry-hunter of you. I w^ould not go after 
 strawberries in the middle of the day, for they 
 are so enticing you are apt at that time to heat 
 your blood. If, when you stoop for them, some- 
 thing begins to rush with a thump into your 
 head, and your eyes mix the vines with the 
 grass, kno^v then that it is time to w^et your tem- 
 ples with spring w^ater and lie down under the 
 shade of a tree. But, whatever happens to 
 you, hold on to your berries, for, -svhen you have 
 cooled off, you will be sorry to have lost them. 
 
 Bowdy-Place lies between two little ponds 
 a mile and a half perhaps from each. These 
 two ponds, one in the Saunders Neighborhood, 
 and the other to the east, called Blue Pond, 
 are like two eyes in the landscape. Set with 
 trees, they glitter like jewels. Safibrd's brook 
 empties into Blue Pond, which, seen from a 
 "Whitefield Corner window, seems to be lying 
 on the top of a forest. 
 
 The land of Whitefield is called " springy" ; 
 
nOWDY-PLACE. 139 
 
 and its overplus of water takes shape in brooks 
 and meadow-land. The brooks which thread 
 its fields and pastures are full of trout, and its 
 meadows are bright and beautiful. The one 
 between the village and Blue Pond overflows 
 in spring ; at which time SafFord's brook be- 
 comes a savage rover. Then men and boys 
 fish by night for smelts and barbels, and make 
 a wild scene with their torches and bonfires. 
 If you have never seen them, you can have no 
 idea how weird they look, flitting about half 
 revealed in the darkness. The barbels, caught 
 with spears, are full of tiny bones, and are* of 
 little worth ; but the smelts, dredged with meal 
 and fried crisp, are so delicious" that I recall 
 their taste though unrcpeated for many years. 
 There was no brook on Bowdy-Place, but a 
 soggy spot in one corner of the field, where 
 grew tall ferns, the spicy odor of which was 
 carried by the wind to young strawberry-pick- 
 ers, who used to cover their berries with 
 them. Whitefield children always called them 
 brakes, and I like this name better than ferns 
 for such strong-scented, thick-ribbed leaves 
 as sprung from the wet land of the town. 
 
 Bowdy-Place was neglected and shaggy, full 
 of rock-heaps and bushes. The Avay tTit'was 
 delightful. It was a farm-path, running under 
 the shadow of trees alongside walls. You had 
 
140 OLD TIME CIIILDLIFE, 
 
 to let down several pairs of bars to get to it, 
 unless you chose to search for a gap in a wall. 
 I never knew but one path pleasanter than this 
 one, and that was the lane which led to my 
 grandfather's house. That lane was unsur- 
 passed for its coolness and verdure; the farm- 
 j)ath for the affluent outgrow^th of its walls. I 
 wish I could paint for you, just as I see it, this 
 line of wall to Bowdy-Place, covered tliick 
 with vines and bushes. It Avas a beautiful 
 natural hedge. 
 
 A long-past morning spent at the place with 
 little Benny comes back to me most vividly, 
 because of an incident and an after-experience. 
 We had filled our pails with berries and had 
 started for the fern-bed, when a snake, by coil- 
 ing around Benny's leg, gave us such a fright 
 that w^e flung our pails behind us and ran for 
 the next field, where we loitered, wishing, yet 
 afraid, to go back. Farmer Lathem spied us 
 and offered to take us home on a load of hay. 
 There Avas a saying in Whitefield that if any- 
 body could " get work out of lazy-bones," that 
 person was Farmer Lathem, and the White- 
 field young men declared tliat it was not safe 
 to go near him in haying-time. 
 
 Benny and I liad heard of this, but the old 
 farmer looked pleasantly over the top of the 
 wall, and when w^e told him about the snake 
 
li WD Y-PLA CE. 141 
 
 he shook liis head and said we must never 
 think of going back after the pails ; that a 
 dozen of them were not worth the risk of a 
 snake-bite. So we let him help us over and 
 put us into a rack, when he turned at once to 
 his man and said, " ISTow we have caught the 
 young rascals, we'll make them tread down 
 our hay. Red Mountain has a storm-cap on. 
 A shower's coming up, and a heavy one at 
 that. Roll and pitch as fast as you can." 
 
 The farmer kept telling us that " treading 
 down" was the best kind of play, but we 
 thought it was hard work. His Sue and Judy 
 were treading down a load on the other side 
 of the field, but they were used to it and their 
 laughter was pleasant to hear. A snake was 
 tossed up with their hay. They did not mind 
 it, although Benny said it made him " crawl 
 all over." 
 
 The winrows were tumbled into heaps, and 
 the heaps were cast on the load. The goaded 
 oxen ran about the field. I had not thought 
 they could go so fast. They tossed us in and 
 out of the hollows and flung the cart about 
 like a plaything. The hay kept slipping this 
 way and that, and it was piled so high above 
 the rack that the farmer charged us to keep 
 in the middle of the load. 
 
 Meanwhile streamers of dried grass began 
 
142 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 to cut loose and fly wildly about. It grew 
 dark ; scurrying drops fell hither and thither. 
 The farmer told his man to stop, and said it 
 was " of no use ; the unpitched hay must get 
 wet in the field." Then, buried neck-deep in 
 the sweet-smelling load, we were jolted over 
 the sill of the barn, and, with Sue and Judy, 
 we made its rafters ring with our shouts. 
 Benny and I never quite knew how we got 
 down to the floor, but the farmer told us we 
 '' acted as if we were as brittle as glass." He 
 said the load would have to " stand over till 
 morning," and that we must stay in the barn 
 until it cleared. 
 
 We stood in the doorway, Judy and Sue 
 and Benny and I, and without speaking stared 
 at the storm. It poured and poured and 
 poured, until water ran in torrents down the 
 road. The forked lightning filled the sky and 
 we were almost stunned by the thunder. We 
 were afraid and wished that the farmer and 
 his men, who were tending their cattle, would 
 come to the door. One flash set the field 
 aflame. With it came such a crash that we 
 thought the barn had been struck and hid our 
 faces in our hands. But it was an oak in a 
 corner of the field, under which our load had 
 a little before loitered. Its branches were 
 stripped and a seam was ploughed through its 
 
BOWDY-PLACE. 143 
 
 trunk. Benny c^nd I began to cry. Judy and 
 Sue pointed their fingers at us and laughed, 
 calling us "two scared little fools." The 
 farmer left his cattle and told the girls to stop. 
 lie said the " worst of it" was over, but that 
 the hay out in the field was quite spoiled. 
 
 Just then there was a rift in a cloud, show- 
 ing a streak of blue. Suddenly the sky was 
 aglow with splendor. You know, my child, 
 what came to pass after that fierce shower, — 
 how the gilded mist went flying hither and 
 thither at the breaking out of the sun ; how 
 the water dried up as fast as it came ; and 
 everything that had been cast down and be- 
 draggled seemed to jump up with a bound; 
 how the air was heavy with scent washed out 
 from grass and clover, and the creatures, 
 which had gone in from the rain, came out 
 again to view. Even the old farmer grew 
 hopeful in the sunshine, and said that, after 
 all, the hay left out was only " the scrapings of 
 the field." 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 WHITEFIELD ACADEMY. 
 
 " The Spring Term of this Institution will commence 
 on Monday, the 24th day of February instant, under the 
 instruction of Mr. John G-. Leeks, whose reputation as a 
 teacher is too well known to need any eulogium. 
 
 " Tuition, twenty-five cents per week. Board can be 
 had in respectable families for one dollar and fifty cents 
 per week. 
 
 *' "William Saylor, Jr., Secretary. 
 
 "Feb. 11, 1840." 
 
 This advertisement is copied, word for word, 
 from a paper called the Dexter Enquirer, which 
 passed through the mail from Dexter to White- 
 field Corner just forty years ago. It was writ- 
 ten by William Saylor himself, secretary of a 
 board of trustees in Whitefield Corner, and 
 also the storekeeper who sold paregoric to the 
 sick man's brother from Boston. 
 
 The academy Avas kept in a room over the 
 meeting-house, which was built two stories 
 high, as its deed says, " for educational pur- 
 poses." It was a large, sunny room, with six 
 many-paned windows, four to the south and 
 
 144 
 
WniTEFIELD ACADEMY. 145 
 
 two to the east. The view from it was delight- 
 ful, and the scholars in it w^ere trained as much 
 to a love of Mature as of study. When I first 
 went into the academy-room it had a look of 
 hard usage. Boys had brought to it from the 
 district-school a habit of Avhittling and fresco- 
 ing, and the dust of past years had been rubbed 
 into seats and desk-lids. I liked it better, 
 however, then, than I did after it had been 
 painted a pea-green, and its walls covered with 
 a pea-green and white paper. ^N'o matter what 
 you did to the room, though, you could not 
 spoil it, for it was always the same sunny, 
 sightly spot, where young boys and girls sat 
 face to face with ^N'ature. 
 
 I recall Mr. Leeks, my first teacher, exactly. 
 He was a pale, thin, hard-working man, of 
 average ability. There was a Mrs. Leeks, 
 mother of Joseph Leeks, of tender years, a 
 boy who made me think of celery. They 
 all three had a bleached look ; and I remem- 
 ber that the Whitefield women objected to 
 the length of Mrs. Leeks's neck. She taught 
 classes in French ; and I have since learned 
 that her accent was by no means pure. They 
 only stayed nine months. 
 
 The school seldom had more than a spring 
 and a fall term of three months each, and w^as 
 taught mostly by fresh graduates from near 
 
146 OLDTIME GHILDLIFE. 
 
 colleges. As a rule the instruction was of a 
 high order ; for it was the custom to send word 
 to any candidate for the place that it was of no 
 use for persons without brains to try to teach 
 in Whiteiield. The school was always full ; 
 for, besides the village boys and girls, scholars 
 walked from the Saunders Neighborhood, from 
 Cokes and Does Corners, and from the town 
 of Boxford. The girls from Boxford were all 
 pretty blondes and were tasteful in their dress. 
 Those from Cokes Corner were inclined to be 
 " swarthy," but were excellent scholars. All 
 of them had a pleasant habit of bringing into 
 the room wild-flowers from the wayside. Some 
 girls " boarded themselves" ; that is, they hired 
 chambers in village houses, and brought with 
 them cooked food enouo'h to last a week, and 
 were allowed some use of kitchen stoves. I 
 remember what a hopeless longing I had to try 
 this style of housekeeping. Boarders from a 
 distance, at a dollar and a half a week, were 
 not many. 
 
 The Boxford boys were stalwart and good- 
 looking, but w^ere thought to be conceited by 
 the Whitefield young people. If you ask after 
 any of them now, you will be told that they 
 were " smart" and " turned out well." They 
 had loud voices and were good readers. On 
 " declamation-day" they roared like young 
 
WHITEFIELD ACADEMY. 147 
 
 lions. This came every Wednesday afternoon, 
 when parents were *' respectfully^ invited to 
 attend." A stage ran along, under the east 
 windows at right angles to the school-room 
 seats, and spectators sat opposite to it. 
 
 What has become of all those eloquent acad- 
 emy boys ? Who could have believed that the 
 splendid, dark-eyed, plumed "Gomez," who 
 dragged in the "old Peruvian," would settle 
 down into a plain country doctor, or that 
 " Marc Antony" would be content to sell shoes ? 
 Who could have imairined that the roll of their 
 recited rhvmcs, which went strais^ht to one's 
 head and heart, was all mock thunder ? 
 
 " At midnight, in his guarded tent, 
 The Turk was dreaming of the hour," — 
 
 But why repeat? You know them all, — the 
 standard " pieces" of those days. The " poor" 
 speakers were greatly pitied. One boy had 
 but two pieces, which he spoke alternately. 
 One of them was the " Burial of Sir John 
 Moore." He had a way of shifting his feet and 
 working his fingers when he declaimed, as if 
 he had been wound up with a crank, which 
 made the girls titter. Teachers used to say 
 that it was of no use trying to make an orator 
 of Leander ; but his mother insisted that as 
 long as he had " any kind of a voice" there 
 
148 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 was hope. Pieces were chosen with taste, and 
 from their much repeating, were accurately 
 learned by all the academy hoys and girls. 
 Grood literature was also found by them in 
 their reading-hooks, from which they read 
 standing up in their seats until told to sit down 
 by the teacher. This was done under a fire 
 of criticism, and the "selections" were truly 
 drilled into memory. I remember, wdien quite 
 a small child, being called upon to read with 
 a loud-spoken young man from Boxford, and 
 w^hen I called, in a piping voice, " Armed say 
 you ?" he shouted back, "Armed, my lord !" 
 with such stage-effect that I lost my place in 
 my book. On the upper shelf of a closet, in 
 a house at Whitefield Corner, may be found 
 samples of most of the readers used in ancient 
 schools. They are full of good things; and 
 their kind had much to do with educating the 
 children of the past. Even " Webster's Spell- 
 ing-Book," with the story at its end of the 
 foolish rabbits, has touched the hearts of many 
 old-fashioned children. Most grown people 
 can recall how they pored over the "illustra- 
 tions" of their school-books, and nothing comes 
 back to a time-marred memorj^ with greater 
 relish and readiness than the rhymes and 
 homilies once learned from them. I used to 
 love the pages of " AVebster's Spelling-Book," 
 
WFIITEFIELD ACADEMY. 149 
 
 headed here and there with a pictured fahlc, — 
 soLace of laggard school hours. I find myself 
 wondering if the children of to-day are able to 
 pick such crumbs of comfort and delight out 
 of their books, as were freely scattered through 
 the driest of the musty volumes packed away 
 on that upper shelf at AYhitefield Corner. 
 The reading-book I liked the least was the 
 " Historical," — a volume which began with an 
 account of the Creation and ended with an 
 address to Deity, in blank verse ; its lightest 
 illustrations being the Pyramids and the Tower 
 of Babel. Yet from this, the driest of them, 
 much was learned. Even a modest little book 
 under my hand, having on its title-page, — 
 ^' The Easy Eeader, — Designed to be used 
 next in course, after the Spelling-Book, in 
 schools and families ; published in Boston, in 
 1828, by John Frost," — has great merit. Most 
 of its pieces are from Mrs. Hemans, Jane 
 Taylor, and Mrs. Barbauld, — tender extracts, 
 fitted to please and leave a moral flavor behind. 
 I open, at random, to the Hour of Prayer, — 
 learned, word for word, by most of the children 
 who used the book. I am glad that forty years 
 passed before I found that the little girl, kneel- 
 ing in front of a rose-bush at the top of the 
 page, as well as all its other pictures, was a 
 miserable wood-cut. 
 
150 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 The boys sat on one side and the girls on 
 the other, in the academy at Whitefield Corner. 
 They were all in dead earnest. Most of them 
 worked with their hands before and after 
 school ; many walked far ; and all tried to get 
 the utmost out of their short tuition. There 
 was more or less rivalry between the boys and 
 girls; the former not liking to be outdone by 
 the latter. A blackboard, nailed to the wall 
 opposite to the stage, was the occasion of many 
 class-contests between them. In compositions 
 the girls were far ahead. One boy in particular, 
 Avho wrote of " spring" and lambs "gambling" 
 on the hillsides, never heard the last of gamb- 
 ling spring lambs. 
 
 The Ml term wound up with an exhibition 
 on a stage, built in front of the meeting- 
 house pulpit, on which ^' Gomez" and " Pi- 
 zarro" and " Marc Antony," in the glory of 
 feathers and swords, awed the plainer people, 
 from the outlying farms of Whitefield, who 
 took these loud-voiced academy boys for real 
 orators. Teachers always offered to excuse 
 Leander from the exhibition ; but his mother 
 made him speak one of his two pieces, because, 
 she said, it would help him " wear off" his bash- 
 fulness." The stage-curtain seldom worked 
 well ; but when it " stuck" it could always be 
 pulled backwards and forwards by little boys. 
 
WIIITEFIELD ACADEMY. 151 
 
 One of the lawyers never failed to suo:2:cst tliat 
 the meeting-house floor was overloaded, which 
 had no other effect than to make some of the 
 women wdiisper that they wished " he would 
 hold his tongue." 
 
 How lono' asro all this seems ! The White- 
 field boys, who fitted for college and declaimed 
 in the pea-green room, now " along in years," 
 are scattered far and wide. Some of them are 
 dead. The room itself, I am told, is intact 
 though time-worn. It is tied to the meeting- 
 house by a deed. Let it stand, the ghostly old 
 room, open, as ever, to one of the rarest of 
 landscapes ! Schools may be kept in it yet ; 
 but it can never hold more eager scholars, or 
 more earnest teachers, than they of forty years 
 ago. If you happen to meet anywhere one of 
 those ancient stage actors, call out, — "How 
 now, Gomez? Whither goest thou?" and 
 you will be answered back : " On yonder hill, 
 amongst the palm-trees, w^e have surprised an 
 old Peruvian. Escape by flight he could not, 
 and we seized him unresisting." 
 
CHAPTER XY. 
 
 THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 
 
 Faiimer Lathem used to say that the weather 
 was '' set in its ways," and tliat the ground 
 always "shut up" about Thanksgiving-time. 
 All northern country-livers know what that 
 shutting up means. Jack Frost flirts weeks 
 beforehand in and out shady corners, while 
 the splendor of field and forest deludes no one 
 by its hectic outburst of coloring. To-day's 
 sunshine melts the rime of the past night ; but 
 it is in nowise to be depended upon. In vain 
 the housewife blankets her flower-beds. To- 
 morrow she wakes up to find only little heart- 
 shaped bare spots in the corners of her win- 
 dow-panes, through which she looks out upon 
 a frozen landscape. Every leaf is gangrened, 
 and every twig is as positive as an exclamation- 
 point : " The ground has shut up !" 
 
 Then follows that newborn indoor-life which, 
 if well regulated, is like a smooth-flowing pas- 
 toral, with here and there a quickening of its 
 rhythm. In the first autumnal freedom of this 
 
 152 
 
THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 153 
 
 life from care, is offered up that tlianksgiving 
 wliieli has become a part of the history of IS'ew 
 Eng'land. In early times the religious fervor of 
 Thanksgiving-Day was far greater than now. 
 "When the gathered fruits of the earth poured 
 into store-rooms and cellars, the hearts of 
 simple ancient workers poured out in grateful 
 worship. With lapse of years family ties 
 broadened, substance waxed fat, and by de- 
 grees the thanksgiving, preceded by much 
 slaughter, became, what an old Puritan would 
 have looked upon as a half-heathen rite. With 
 all due deference, however, to the sweet piety 
 with which these same Puritans observed it, I 
 must confess that it is the flavor of smoking 
 fleshpots — not that of strong sermons — which 
 has come down to me from my childhood 
 Thanksgivings. 
 
 Kext to the religious aspect of this day, its 
 best essence has always been its hospitality. 
 It is the home-rallying point of disintegrated 
 families, — ^the altar from which the incense of 
 affection goes up with that of baked meats, 
 and kindleth anew from its 3^early gathering 
 of forces. " Going home to Thanksgiving" 
 is the watchword of many old New Eng- 
 land families ; and with them, for that day at 
 least, the current of love flows backward to 
 the fathers and mothers and the dear old 
 n 
 
154 OLDTLME CHILDLTFE. 
 
 grandparents, who sit waiting by ancestral 
 hearths. 
 
 Were the Thanksgiving dinners of forty years 
 ago better than the Thanksgiving dinners of 
 to-day ? "Were they better than any dinners 
 of to-day ? or are they relished by the piquant 
 sauces of indulgent memory? I think the 
 dinners were in every way better, — better in 
 material, in make-up, in baking, and in serv- 
 ing. The sweet, firm fibre of their flesh and 
 fowl had been fed upon sun-ripened grain and 
 fruits. Their toothsome condiments and mix- 
 tures were the work of the skilled housewife, 
 who, wlien her viands were ready, had a brick 
 oven to cook and brown them in as she willed. 
 
 For skill of engineering what could surpass 
 one of these dinners, built up by a great deal of 
 work done on a side-track ? In W^iitefield Cor- 
 ner children helped chop the mince-meat, and, 
 under sharp maternal eye, stoned, the raisins. 
 The oven quietly swallowed up and as quietly 
 disgorged. Save by unusually sweet odors much 
 of the previous preparation hardly betrayed it- 
 self. But on Thanksgiving-Day, what hidden 
 secrets of pantry and closet were revealed ! 
 The dinner — ^in reality the condensed result of 
 many days of intelligent, persistent labor — 
 passed smoking hot from the oven to the table ; 
 gravies and sauces glided in by side-doors ; 
 
TIIANKSGIVIXO DINNERS. 155 
 
 pickles took their places, and the oldtimc hoy 
 Avas as deaf to the grace as he had heen to the 
 previous sermon. He foolishly gave no heed 
 to the dear mother's often-repeated suggestion 
 that the dinner had just hegun. He ate freely 
 of turkey and stuffing and side-dishes, and only 
 slighted the chicken-pie hecause of a squahhlc 
 over a wish-hone which, undried, refused to 
 break. The pudding proved to he what was 
 called '' filling" ; and I do not believe that 
 a middle-aged, country-born In^cw Englander 
 lives who does not recall the exquisite pang 
 with which, in childhood, a semi-circle of 
 Thanksgiving pie was sometimes left upon the 
 plate. A small girl, or boy, was seldom un- 
 equal to an after-dash at raisins and nuts, and 
 never can die out of memory that supreme air 
 of contentment which used, from the dear old 
 grandmother down to the youngest child, to 
 settle upon a family after it had partaken of a 
 Thanks2:ivino^ dinner. 
 
 Thankfulness took the form of rest. The old 
 people dozed, careful householder and busy 
 matron let go the reins of care, and children 
 dreamily floated through the afternoon hours of 
 this memorial day. Nature herself seemed to 
 abet their mood, and to mellow the atmosphere 
 both indoors and out. The happy season was 
 lengthened by withholding of candles, and the 
 
15G OLDTTME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 brightness of sunset filled the room like a bene- 
 diction. 
 
 Better still, the beantiful aftergloAv of inno- 
 cent social life, of which the grandfather and 
 grandmother were the centre, when nuts and 
 apples were brought in and talk pleasantly took 
 the form of reminiscence. 
 
 Best of all, that sweet and tender parting, 
 when, in the later evening, the dear old folks 
 sped the little ones with their blessing, and, 
 crowned by the ruddy firelight, foreshadowed 
 to these, their loitering young lovers, their 
 own coming glory. 
 
 When I say that the material of the oldtime 
 country Thanksgiving dinner was better than 
 that of a like dinner of to-day, I know where- 
 of I afiirm. So much in my childhood did the 
 best yearly products of the earth converge into 
 Thanksgiving-Day that it became to country 
 boys a sort of fetich, to which objects were 
 dedicated long beforehand with the prefix of 
 Thanksgiving. Every thrifty home had its 
 Thanksgiving turkey and pullets and pig set 
 aside for careful tending, at the slaughter of 
 which the young barbarians were always ready 
 to lend a helping hand. They had their own 
 especial wild-forage ofierings, such as sweet 
 flag and nuts. They loved the previous mys- 
 teries and bustle of the day, and the Avonder is 
 
THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 157 
 
 that out of so mucli carnal eutansclemont of it 
 tliey could carry into mature life, as they did, 
 its pure, vivifying sentiment of heav^enly wor- 
 ship and family love. 
 
 Close upon it, Whitefield farmers used to 
 prowl, lantern in hand, in and out barns and 
 sheds, after unwary fowl, whose fatness had 
 marked them weeks beforehand for the sacri- 
 Hcial knife. What tid])its went, day by day, 
 into the rounding-out of such Thanksgiving 
 turkeys, geese, and pullets as made gourmands 
 out of the eaters of them ! How clean and 
 innocent looked the inevitable, disembowelled 
 pig, which, with its flakes of white fat, hung, 
 at the right season, before almost every flirm- 
 er's door ! The roast of this pig known, Avhen 
 served at a Thanksgiving dinner, as sparerib, 
 had been fattened upon buttermilk and corn- 
 meal. Its best relish could be gotten by taking 
 it on the sly, rib by rib, between thumb and fin- 
 ger, and dexterously sucking its inmost juices. 
 Sweeter meat than that next its bone is no- 
 where to be found. As my grandmother used 
 to say of the crust of her johnny-cakes, into 
 every fibre of it seemed to have gone the 
 golden glory of the corn. 
 
 I am just as positive about the cooking as I 
 am about the material of the dinners. Tlie 
 relish of the oldtime mince-pies has quite 
 
158 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 passed into tradition, — those pies upon which 
 our stalwart ancestors throve, and with which 
 the}' regaled their guests. They have been de- 
 cried because they have been misunderstood. 
 They were the product of the skilled labor of 
 the housewife, not the experiment of the hand- 
 maiden. Hence they have to be largely a thing 
 of the past. Baked in brick ovens they were 
 no more like the thin, stove-dried, dyspepsia- 
 giving abortions sold in shops, than the Thanks- 
 giving pig fed by a farmer's wife upon milk 
 and meal, is like the poisonous swine driven 
 through city streets. 
 
 An impression, in some localities, seems to 
 prevail that IN'ew England people have been, 
 and still are, largely fed upon pies. The diet 
 has also been strongly condemned as unhealth- 
 ful. It may be so ; still, with my own recol- 
 lections of them, I should be in a state of daily 
 thanksgiving if there could as often appear 
 upon my table one of my grandmother's deli- 
 cious pies. 
 
 A true Thanksgiving mince-pie should be 
 an inch thick, with a thin, flaky crust, tinted 
 by its imprisoned juices, which threaten to 
 break through like blood from overfall veins. 
 Around its edge must be a slight crinkle made 
 by the tines of a fork or castor-bottle cover; 
 and in its top a hole here and there from the 
 
THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 159 
 
 Stroke of a knife to let the steam out. This 
 steam, once known, can never be forgotten, — 
 the intermingled exhalation of beef and pork 
 or suet, and apples and raisins and citron and 
 sugar and spices and boiled cider, and, in pro- 
 fane families, of a dash of good brandy. When 
 you press upon its upper crust, there should 
 gush up from the slashes a brown grayy, spark- 
 ling with tiny globules of fat, and deliciously 
 scenting the room. Fortunate they who have 
 been permitted to relish, with a slice of cream- 
 cheese, and a mug of sweet cider, this health- 
 ful, bliss-giving pie ! 
 
 How, as I talk about such common things, 
 the fashioners of them come back to me ! It 
 is like opening the door to a gallery of old por- 
 traits, from out whose dim perspective wrinkled 
 hands beckon to me ; and, because I will it, 
 lead me to oldtime thanksgiving altars, — al- 
 tars before w^hich ministered simple-hearted, 
 unveneered, godly people, and whose smoking 
 incense has been filtered by time into a fragrant 
 memory. Indeed, the glory of Thanksgiving- 
 Day is that heart, that core of it, wdiich under- 
 lies all outer crust of worldliness. It is born 
 of, and takes hold utterly, of family-life. Hence 
 one is miserly of such customs of it, be they 
 ever so homely, as pleasantly link him or her 
 with the [tast. 
 
160 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 A little more than forty years ago I went, late 
 one afternoon, with my grandmother, to visit 
 Mrs. Merrill, Avho lived at the top of Merrill's 
 Hill, in the town of East Road, the woman of 
 whom I borrowed the rennet. It was the day 
 before Thanksgiving, and Mrs. Merrill, with 
 her daughter and her sister, Avas busy making 
 mince-pies. She was a plump, rosy-cheeked, 
 spry little woman, — the best kind of a figure 
 to put in the foreground of a genre j)icture. 
 Hanging from a crane in the kitclien fire- 
 place was a steaming pot full of mince-meat, 
 which Mrs. Merrill stirred with a spoon and 
 dipped into crusted plates, passed to her by 
 her daughter, Josephine, — a tall, thin, tallowy- 
 faced girl, expert at cutting off superfluous 
 pie-crust by running a knife rapidly around 
 the edge of a plate. Before a table stood Mrs. 
 Merrill's sister, rolling out little pats of crust, 
 sliced from a flaky lump into thin leaves, which 
 she folded and then unfolded upon the plates 
 as they shifted through Josephine's hands to 
 the pot. The passes were made so quickly 
 that they seemed almost like sleigh t-of-h and. 
 The pies were baked in batches, and just after 
 we went in the sister took one batch out of 
 the oven and put in another. 
 
 At first Mrs. Merrill proposed to go with us 
 into the " foreroom," but my grandmother 
 
THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 161 
 
 told her to "keep right on with lier work," 
 which she seemed ghid to do, as the heat of 
 her oven she said had gotten low and must be 
 " brisked up with coals." 
 
 I sat and watched and listened to these 
 women. They talked much of pies and the 
 mysteries of their making. Mrs. Merrill told us 
 that " father" (meaning Mr. Merrill) had bought 
 his raisins at West instead of East lioad ; and 
 though they were a cent higher on a pound, 
 they Avere not so good as those of the year 
 before. Her boiled cider was also less strong 
 than usual, hence she feared for the quality of 
 her pies. She offered a taste of her meat to 
 my grandmother, who smacked her lips, and 
 told Mrs. Merrill that she must be "fishing for 
 a compliment," for no better meat than hers 
 ever " went into a pie." Then they all praised 
 the color of it, and my grandmother handed 
 the half-filled spoon over to me, which I lapped 
 quite clean. 
 
 Mrs. Merrill told us, in confidence, that she 
 should have put a little " spirit" into her meat, 
 had she not been afraid that it would "go 
 against the grain" of her sister's husband, 
 who was a minister,— one of the " called kind," 
 and " a master-hand," she declared, " at a re- 
 vival." One was " going on," she said, then, 
 at West lload, and she could not sec what 
 
162 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 made her Josephine so '' stiff-necked." The 
 pies were for early winter use. " Father" had 
 put up a hanging-shelf for them in the garret, 
 out of the way of mice, and she did hope they 
 would " taste like something." 
 
 "When it grew dark she told Josephine to 
 "" light up," and the " tallow-dip" only brought 
 out into sharp-cut silhouette these quaint 
 workers at their homely task. The fire glowed, 
 the pot sputtered, the pies were shaped and 
 baked, the women prattled. Then the father 
 and the preacher came in, both stalwart and 
 good-natured. The crane was swung back, 
 Josephine lighted up the " foreroom," and 
 shortly my grandmother went home. I left 
 the actual scene behind me, but thepicturesque- 
 ness, the spirit of it, brought out by firelight, 
 is immortal. 
 
 Dear old workers, with your dear old ways, 
 my pen lingers lovingly over you. I remember 
 perfectly how, as I went out from them to the 
 top of Merrill's Hill, the sharp peaks of a dis- 
 tant mountain range stood out against the sky, 
 which was red with the afterglow of sunset, — 
 rugged yet beautiful. Just so, in the afterglow 
 of life, stand out in memory such customs, 
 with their experiences, as took root in the 
 sources of rational enjoyment. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 I THINK, after all, that Latliem's wood was 
 the best playground of the children of White- 
 field. How many hours did Benny and I 
 loiter reverently in the heart of this old forest 
 and Avatch, through its interlocked branches, 
 an immeasurable depth of sky, with its clouds 
 sailing away from us, and its blue growing 
 deeper and deeper ! 
 
 Benny said it seemed as if he could see 
 straight through them into heaven; that the 
 solemn old wood made him sad; and once, 
 while Ivinsf on one of its knolls, in the mellow 
 brightness of an early autum^i day, he said he 
 felt like crying ; and he did not know what 
 the matter was. How many of you have had 
 your hearts touched by such far-off outlook 
 through the trees of an old wood ? 
 
 Lathem's wood and pasture were full of ed- 
 ible thinofs. Tliere was not a berrv to be 
 found anywhere in Whitefield whicli tlicv did 
 not somewhere l)riiig forth, — on kn(.)lls, along 
 
1G4 OLD TIME CniLDLIFE. 
 
 walls, in corners, by rocks, or around jagged 
 stumps. The boys and girls of Whitelield 
 Corner got much gum from this wood, where 
 it was to be found in lumps on the jagged 
 bark of spruce-trees. When " clear," it slowly 
 softened in the mouth, turning from amber 
 color to a pale pink. It was a staple article 
 of trade with schoolboys, who in winter kept 
 their pockets full of it, and cliewers might be 
 heard asking each other if their gum was 
 " soft" or " hard," or getting " crumbly." 
 
 If you sit down on one of the knolls of 
 Lathem's wood, cushioned thick with the out- 
 worn leaves of old trees, and turn over its dead 
 waste, from underneath will come to light 
 verdure and manifold insects. The ground 
 will seem to be alive. You will also find rem- 
 nants of last year's harvest : three-sided beech- 
 nuts much eaten by worms, and sodden acorns, 
 some of them tufted with twin leaves, the be- 
 ginning of trees. In a certain hollow stump 
 the year before* was a squirrel's nest fall of 
 beechnuts cleanly shelled. The cunning rover 
 has eaten them and gone. Late in autumn 
 these nuts are to be found fresh beneath the 
 beech-trees, amongst fallen leaves and in 
 the crevices of black mould. They are tiny, 
 but full and sweet-meated, easy upon pockets, 
 and crack under the teeth with a harmless 
 
LATIIEM'S WOOD. 1G5 
 
 click. Hung up in calico l)ags to dry, they 
 grow richer by keeping. With patience they 
 can be gathered from gradual droppings, 
 though after their burrs Avere opened by frost 
 the boys of Whitefield climbed the trees and 
 shook them down upon sheets. The best way 
 is to scramble for them to the music of crack- 
 ling leaves and brushwood, when they will 
 slip into hollows and under the edges of 
 rocks. Whiteiield children used to store 
 away red-oak acorns for winter use, and it is 
 surprising how much bitterness will go out 
 of these with drying. The white-oak acorn 
 was much esteemed, but I always thought it 
 insipid. 
 
 A half-day's diversion in Lathem's wood 
 forty years ago is as real to me as the events 
 of yesterday. It seems hardly worth writing 
 about that Benny and I went " brooming" 
 with Betsy, had it not been Benny's last ram- 
 ble outside the village of AVhitefield. In 
 earlier days New England housewives made 
 their brooms from freshly-broken hemlock 
 branches. '' Goins: broominsc" was as much 
 an item of their weekly labor as were scrub- 
 bing and mending. The shaping and tying 
 up of a hemlock broom into a well-rounded, 
 compact mass was quite an art, and, when 
 newly made, it flung a resinous odor into a 
 
166 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 room. By sprinkling it and standing it, when 
 not in use, in tlie cool cellarway, it could be 
 made to last days, and in winter " broom stuft"' 
 would keep for weeks in a cellar where it had 
 been stored for use. "When young prowlers 
 came, in Lathem's wood, upon a spot where, 
 in the trampled snow, were scattered sprigs of 
 hemlock, they said, " A broomer has been 
 here." The brooms, at their best, were short- 
 liyed, soon shedding and easily slipping from 
 their " sticks"; but they sent children into the 
 beautiful Ayoods and out to meet the briirht- 
 ness of the year's best days. 
 
 Betsy broke her hemlock, and, as there was 
 no need, she said, " of tugging the odds and 
 ends home," she shaped and eyened her broom 
 under the trees, and shook it and stamped 
 upon it until it was ready to be tied on. Its 
 pungent juices were let out by this bruising 
 into the old wood, — unbidden incense of that 
 happy day. 
 
 ITear by, alongside a wall, was a row of 
 dead young pines, with their girdled bark 
 hanging. 
 
 " What's the matter with those pines ?" 
 asked Benny. 
 
 '' Sliyered," said Betsy. 
 
 " Slivered ?" 
 
 ''Yes, slivered. Didn't you ever eat a 
 
LATHEM'S WOOD. 1G7 
 
 sliver?" Then she told us how to sliver a 
 tree, and I will tell you. 
 
 E'ever go into woods after slivers, lest you 
 spoil growing timber and either get a whip- 
 ping or have damages to pay. Take a sharp 
 knife in spring, and when you have come to a 
 young straggling pine, alongside a wall, draw 
 your blade round it as far as you can reach 
 from the ground. Turn down the bark, and 
 inside of it, on the trunk of the tree, you will 
 find a juicy, milk-white lining, which you must 
 scrape off. It will ripple in ribbons, and you 
 will probably have to hold your mouth to catch 
 them. These are " slivers." How delicious 
 they are ! The juice of them runs down your 
 knife-handle, through your fingers, out of the 
 corners of your mouth, tickles your palate, 
 and for days afterwards stains your face and 
 hands. I would not " sliver," children, for, 
 after all, it gives but a transient pleasure, and 
 you eat the heart of a tree, the ghost of which, 
 like the dead pines of Lathem's wood, will 
 make sorry any Eature-loving heart. 
 
 After we had talked about the slivered pines 
 that afternoon, I remember with the sad dis- 
 tinctness of all memorial days, how we all sat 
 down on the big rock at the base of which 
 was the trout-pool. Into this pool foolish flies 
 kept tumbling with a tiny eddy, and every 
 
168 OLD TIME CniLDLIFE. 
 
 now and then something would make a splash 
 ill the water. Bushes, feehle for lack of sun- 
 shine, fell over the rock and trailed along with 
 the current. It was such a shady, restful 
 place that Benny said he would like to be a 
 fish in that pool for a day. We were thirsty, 
 and he thought he would dip some water from 
 it with his hat. Something shot into this, — 
 an arrow, a flash, a gleam of gold. Benny 
 had caught a trout; and, quick as thought, 
 lifting the brim of his hat above the water, 
 made a net of its crown. Then he sent me to 
 Dame Safford for a pail, which she was loth 
 to- lend. It was the first trout he had ever 
 caught, and we were proud as we carried it 
 l)etween us along the road to the old dame's 
 cottage. Farmer Lathem met us on the way 
 and stopped and looked into the pail, with his 
 scythe standing out on his shoulder. His little 
 dog came along and he looked in too, poising 
 himself on its edge. 
 
 " It's a proper nice little fish," said the 
 farmer. " I'd drop it down in a well, where 
 'twill eat up all the bugs and worms." 
 
 Then he went on, with his dog following 
 after. I see just how he looked, with his long 
 scythe, and his stooping gait, and his little dog 
 trotting behind him, — the hardy, resolute old 
 farmer. Time cannot steal such positive ^g- 
 
LATHEM'S WOOD. 160 
 
 iires from me, nor the aspect of pleasant places. 
 Even atmospheres stay by me, like the dense, 
 smoky air of that long-past day 
 
 We kept setting down the pail to look in, 
 and the little fish swam round and round, 
 turning its bright mottles to the sun. We told 
 Dame Safford what Farmer Lathem had said, 
 and hoped she would ofi:er to lend us her pail; 
 but she did not, so we had to give her our fish 
 to put in her well, and she let it down in a 
 leaky old bucket tied to its pole with a rope. 
 Benny and I hated to leave it, for it w^as a part 
 of the brightness of our day. We threw little 
 pebbles over the curb, and they w^ent down 
 with a spluttering sound, slightly rippling the 
 water. It was a charming old w^ell, with its 
 dripping, mossy rocks, and ^ve leaned so flu- 
 over its curb that the dame drew us away and 
 shook us both soundly. 
 
 Then she was sorry for wliat she had done, 
 and asked us to sit down with her by the door. 
 Betsy came up from the woods, and the old 
 dame grew very friendl3\ After a while,— I 
 do not remember what brought it about,— she 
 began to tell us of little Saran (Sarah Ann was 
 what she meant), who w^as burned half a dozen 
 years before. "The fire," she said, " had gone 
 out on the hearth, and, as w^e had no matches, 
 I had to send her for coals." 
 
 12 
 
170 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 " You see that blacksmith's shop at the foot 
 of the hill, and the road between it and the 
 wall ? 'Twas there it happened. We never knew 
 just how. I saw her first, all of a blaze, and, 
 before I could get to her, 'twas done ! 
 
 " She was a sweet, pooty gal, my Saran. She 
 had a ladyfied way with her, and was smart at 
 her books, if it is me that says it. She was 
 only ten years old when she died, and could 
 read and write better than her father. He 
 was awful cut up by it, and took to drink right 
 off." 
 
 Benny and I looked at the blacksmith's shop, 
 standing at the foot of the hill. It was ragged 
 and had passed out of use ; and the path down 
 which Sarah Ann came was quite overgrown 
 with blackbeny-bushes. On the brow of the 
 hill, with a row of bright pans before its door, 
 was the trim little cottage whence she had 
 gotten her coals. 
 
 "We had heard her story often before, and 
 had read it on a stone in the old burial-ground, 
 in which her grave had been the last to be dug. 
 It had only touched us then like some dim 
 tradition of the past ; but that day, from her 
 mother's lips, it became real to us. It took 
 hold of our young hearts, and we shed tears 
 over little " Saran," who was burned six 3-cars 
 before. 
 
LATHEMS WOOD. 171 
 
 Sucldenlj the old dame said : " You are nice 
 little children ; but the sun is getting low and 
 you had better go home." We knew what that 
 meant. Old Safford was coming, so we ran 
 back into the wood, while he staggered over 
 the bridge. 
 
 It is sad, yet sweet, the way in which one 
 clings to the slightest incidents of a life which 
 is ended. Memory is rich in jewels coined 
 by love out of trifles. For instance, I remem- 
 ber that as Benny and I were running through 
 the village somebody called out to us from a 
 window : 
 
 " Children, children, come here ; a lady from 
 Portsmouth wants to see you!" 
 
 Benny shot away like an arrow. I never 
 knew how that lady from Portsmouth looked. 
 I had a dim consciousness of somebody telling 
 me to wipe my feet on the mat, and of some- 
 body else asking me if I were dumb. Then 
 the lady from Portsmouth laughed, patted me 
 on the head, and told me I might go home. I 
 did not hesitate to obey her, and from that day 
 to this I have hated the lady from Portsmouth. 
 
 My dear children, if these simple incidents, 
 which swarm in my mind as I talk with you, 
 seem of little worth, trust me when I tell you 
 that the more of such you lay up the richer 
 and happier you Avill bo. When you arc worn 
 
172 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 or sick or sorrowful, and when 3- ou are old, they 
 will rest you ; and many pictures will jolease 
 you, because the artist will only have painted 
 with his brush what you have loved in Nature. 
 
 I would go a long distance to get into a 
 thread of a path which leads through a wide 
 gate into a woodland. A beautiful, brown-eyed 
 girl, called Marion, walks in it. She tramples 
 through tall brakes, plucks flowers, talks to 
 trees as if they had souls, and comes out radi- 
 ant and unconscious that from her has gone 
 out for me a memorial aspect into the dim old 
 wood. Under an oak-tree, she fills her apron 
 with acorns, which she afterwards spreads in 
 the sun to dry. They are bitter, worthless 
 things in reality ; but she loves them, for they 
 are a part of the affluence of her field. She 
 pulls apart the matted grass, and watches her 
 ground-sparrows with a wide-eyed wonder. 
 Another day, with no less wonder, she will 
 find the nest empty and will bring it away. 
 She sits upon a shaded rock-heap, or hovers 
 in and about the field, drinking sweetness and 
 glory into her young life, and gives for me an 
 undying glow to the things about her. 
 
 Out of all her jocund days I can only show 
 you an empty bird's-nest and a few acorn-shells. 
 Yet the past delight of field and woodland are 
 still mine; and in memory, hand-in-hand with 
 
LATIJEM'S WOOD. 173 
 
 this brown - eyed little girl, when nobody 
 watches me, I go in and out the zigzag path, 
 down into the wood, which is just as full as 
 ever of the tracks of her little feet, and the 
 sound of her child-voice, which will speak to 
 me as long as life lasts. 
 
 Somebody lighted a bonfire close by the edge 
 of this wood. It w^as only the burning of dried 
 stubble ; but this same brown-eyed little girl 
 saw it, dropped her acorns, and cried aloud 
 with delight. She prattled, with sweet speech, 
 of the oxen, the upturned cart, the red-shirted 
 laborers, the curling smoke, and the rich browns 
 of the ploughed sod ; all framed in the crimson 
 vintage of the year. The scent of dying stub- 
 ble always will bring back this scene to me, 
 with the eloquent speech of the dead child. 
 
 Many more such tender memories, binding 
 me to Mature, are left untold; for, lest I w^eary 
 you, I stop. Meanwhile, when on your way to 
 a far-famed mountain-resort, you glide, by rail, 
 through a deep ravine, over one Avail of which 
 you catch a glimpse of the sloping roofs of 
 barns and houses, imbedded in trees and over- 
 topped by a tall wdiite spire, gone in a flash ; 
 and presently you pull up at a neat little sta- 
 tion in the middle of a pasture, the conductor 
 will call out " Whitefield I" That village is 
 not Whitefield Corner, as I knew it. Its oldest 
 
174 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 and quaintest houses have been made over, and 
 all others stare at you with an aspect of new- 
 ness. The spire is a thing of late date and is 
 the pride of the villagers. The old Whitefield 
 was weather-worn and gray, and seemed to 
 nestle in the landscape. 
 
 Still, this one is beautiful, for its trees are 
 more majestic than ever, quite overhanging 
 the straight street with dense shade, and 
 giving to the traveller a cool perspective down 
 towards the Corner, where stand the tavern, 
 the post-office, and the stores. You must stay 
 in "Whitefield at least a week to have its varied 
 and beautiful scenery painted on your heart. 
 
CHAPTER XYII. 
 
 QUEER FOLKS. 
 
 If you wonder, my clear children, why I 
 have made so little of that coarse language, 
 thought by many to he freely spoken in the 
 rural districts of ]^ew England, I will say 
 that very few of the farmers' families which 
 I have known, have talked in that way. 
 
 There was a farmer, living outside of White- 
 field Corner, whose speech was jagged as its 
 rocks. Tied to the soil, he was almost as stolid 
 as the oxen he drove. He chewed tobacco in 
 meeting-time, and spit into a box filled with saw- 
 dust in a corner of his pew. He called hi s daugh- 
 ters " gals," and his wife the " old woman." He 
 was uncouth yet honest, and did no harm, ex- 
 cept when he leaned upon his hoe-handle by 
 the wayside and amused a traveller by " coarse 
 expressions," which the latter was likely to 
 repeat as specimens of Yankee dialect. Such 
 will always be found, all over the country, here 
 and there, on lonely farms, because there will 
 always be born, in the country as well as in the 
 
 175 
 
176 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 city, vulgar people who can take no polish. 
 Their talk is no more a type of that of N^ew 
 England farm-life than the striped trousers of 
 the traditional Brother Jonathan are a type of 
 its ever^^-day dress. 
 
 The farm-talk which T have most heard was 
 homely, but not coarse, — strong and full of 
 figures, — figures drawn from the soil and devo- 
 tion to it. Its peculiar pronunciation, so vastly 
 exaggerated, was an accident which became it 
 at the time, but which has largely fallen oiF in 
 later generations. E'o better orators or writers 
 have ever spoken or written, in this country, 
 than certain ones whose wits were sharpened 
 in the stimulating atmosphere of this quaint, 
 figurative New England tongue. It was truly 
 born of earth and toil, hence its healthy rug- 
 gedness. Hence, also, that underlying imagery, 
 borrowed from sun and winds, field and forest, 
 from all forms and aspects of Nature. There 
 was a marrow to it often, inside an outer 
 crust of homeliness, a sweet-meat of sentiment. 
 "When the farmer told you that his wife was a 
 " good critter to work," he compared her to 
 his mild-eyed oxen, which he loved, and which 
 to him were the type of patience and meek- 
 ness. When he said he was having " a hard 
 pull" in life, his words were shaped by the 
 tugging of these same oxen at his rocky farm. 
 
QUEER FOLKS. 177 
 
 He scarcely opened his lips without letting fall 
 some homely comparison. He " sweat like 
 rain," was "hungry as a bear," "tired as a 
 dog," " dry as a chip." He " patched" and 
 " eked out" things, and " saved up" the 
 "odds and ends" of tasks for rainy days. 
 ^Neighbors gave each other "starts" and 
 "lifts" w^ith their work, which was always 
 either " dragging," or " going easy." If a 
 farmer wanted to " get on in the world," or to 
 be " forehanded," he had to " put his shoulder 
 to the plough," and " push like a dragon." 
 They all had " set ways" and liked to "jog on" 
 day by day, " evenly yoked" with their wives. 
 They were " long-headed," and given to " fore- 
 cast," and with " tolerable good luck" could 
 " hoe their own row." It was often a "hard 
 tug," but as they grew old they " slacked up," 
 and they always spoke of death as the ending 
 of one "journey," and the beginning of another. 
 Half the talk of Farmer Lathem w\ns made 
 up of old saw^s. " To get along," he said, 
 " one must take time by the forelock." Early 
 in tlie mornino; he mij^ht be heard shoutins; to 
 Judy and Sue : " Hurry up, girls ! It's the 
 early bird that catches the worm." He was as 
 wcatherwise as an almanac, and was always 
 telling his neighbors to make their hay while 
 the sun shone. When asked how his wife was, 
 
178 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 he would answer : " As spry as a cricket," or 
 "As chipper as a bird." If he was to be 
 believed, he never had a hired man who was 
 not " as slow as a snail," and who did not make 
 him " as mad as a March hare." He was called 
 " close" with his money, but you would not 
 blame him if you knew how hard he had to 
 work to get it. 
 
 His wife, Judy, talked like him. She visited 
 but little, because she was "tied, hand and 
 foot," by her work. If she only " ran into a 
 neighbor's" for a little, she declared that it 
 " took the heart right out of a day," and, 
 likely as not, made her " work drag" for a 
 week. She hung her clothes to dry " in the 
 ej'C of the sun," because they came in then 
 " as white as the driven snow." In early spring 
 she spread the same to bleach in the orchard, as 
 only " May-dews and apple-blossoms" would 
 " take stains out." She told time less by the 
 clock than by the " lay of the sun." She had 
 a notch cut in a window-sill for high noon ; 
 and, after that, judged of the hours by ih.Q 
 " slant of the sunbeams" on the floor. She 
 liked " smart clearing-up showers"; but a slow, 
 drizzling rain, in which rust and mildew " ate 
 things," put her out, she said. 
 
 There is another aspect of country - life 
 which, because of its sad reality, I shall reveal 
 
QUEER FOLKS. 179 
 
 to you. I tell you of it just as I Avould put 
 a shadow into a picture, were I painting one, 
 for I wish to be truthful. 
 
 Two miles away from East Road was a col- 
 lection of half a dozen or more hovels, lived 
 in by social outcasts, breakers of the Sabbath, 
 reckless of law, and unclean in their ways. 
 Their yards swarmed with pigs and geese and 
 dirty-faced children, while there seemed to be 
 a dog and two or three cats to every hut. 
 Grizzly, unkempt men lounged in their door- 
 ways, and sour-faced women, in bedraggled 
 dresses, stared at passers-by in a brazen way. 
 The latter peddled blackberries from door to 
 door at East Road in summer, and being 
 what was called " light-fingered," were always 
 watched. The men planted patches of ground 
 ■\vith corn and potatoes. In winter they shot 
 ccame, and then their shed and house-walls 
 were thick with stretched skins of animals, 
 the odor of one kind of which was a nuisance 
 to passers-by. They stole most of their wood, 
 and now and then a sheep was missing from a 
 pasture, the " carcass" of which honest farm- 
 ers Avould hint might be found at Kit's Cor- 
 ner. The men also worked out at haying and 
 harvesting and did odd jobs in winter, but no 
 respectable farmer's wife would give room to 
 one of the women. 
 
180 OLD TIME CIIILDLIFE. 
 
 The only pleasant things about the spot were 
 the sunflowers and other common blossoms 
 which were in front of the mean little houses. 
 These throve upon unthrift ; they grew double 
 out of its waste ; and the sunflowers seemed 
 to turn their fat faces with a leer to the sun. 
 In every other respect this hamlet was as far 
 away from the decorous life of East Road as 
 one pole is from the other. 
 
 Another wicked neighborhood, made up, 
 like that of Kit's Corner, of half a dozen or 
 more families, was called, after its first two 
 settlers. Drown City. It was not so bad as 
 Kit's Corner. Its men and women got their 
 living from their little farms, and were not 
 thieves. They were also quite tidy in their 
 ways, but they were a drinking, quarrelsome 
 set. No one of them was ever seen inside 
 the Whitefield Corner meeting-house. They 
 worked or gossiped from door to door on 
 Sunday, and their children ran at large. In 
 summer the women on that day picked blue- 
 berries, which they exchanged for dry-goods 
 and groceries at the AYliitefield Corner stores. 
 
 One of them, called old Betty Drown, was a 
 funny-looking creature. She was so short and 
 fat that she waddled when she walked. She 
 always wore a white muslin cap with a frill of 
 bobbinet and a broad white apron. The "White- 
 
QUEER FOLKS. 181 
 
 field women said she had " an oily tongue," 
 and that " butter woukln't melt in her mouth." 
 She could shed tears when she chose ; so that 
 when one woman wanted to call another de- 
 ceitful, it was the custom to say that she could 
 " cry as easy as old Betty Drown." Her ber- 
 ries were thought to be uncommonly clean. 
 Iler husband used to walk over to Whitefield 
 Corner with her to help her carry back her 
 " store-goods." He had a huge swelling in 
 his neck, because of which he was such a 
 fright to look at that children ran away from 
 him, and it made him very angry to be stared 
 at. 
 
 The pair always took home from Whitefield 
 Corner a little jug of molasses and a bottle of 
 rum. They were both foolish when they were 
 tipsy, but the Drown City drunkards, as a 
 whole, were brawlers. The quarrels of the 
 place were notorious, yet it Avas delightfully 
 located on the shore of a little pond, and its 
 indwell ers were by nature shrewd and hard- 
 working:. What it lacked was relififion. It 
 had neither meeting-house nor school-house, 
 and, because its Sabbath was unkept, sin crept 
 in and ate all good out of it. 
 
 Wherever, forty years ago, a village was 
 clustered around a meeting-house, and had in 
 its outskirts a school-house with a beaten play- 
 
182 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 ground, there good citizens were sure to be 
 found. I have never known statelier and 
 nobler men and women than I used to know 
 in Whitefield Corner and in other just such 
 little villao^es. 
 
 In a dark chamber of one of the "Whitefield 
 Corner stores, where many goods were also 
 kept, was a library of books, begun two-thirds 
 of a century ago by Deacon Saunders' father, the 
 first minister of the place, a wise man. Most of 
 them were classic, bound in thick brown leather, 
 and the raggedest books of the whole lot were its 
 volumes of Shakespeare. This was because 
 these had been so often read, and somebody had 
 stitched on their disjointed covers with twine. 
 It was common to find the trail of grease upon a 
 page, — ^lamp-oil or the drip of a tallow candle, 
 — and there were few books without dog-ears 
 and finger-marks. They were kept in three 
 pine cases with glass doors. I remember how 
 I used, when a child, to work my way past 
 crates and boxes to them, and with what awe 
 I ran my finger across their dim titles. These 
 best of books, as much as, if not more than, 
 anything else, formed the minds and manners 
 of the people of Whitefield. 
 
 These people let Drown City alone, because, 
 despite their learning and their taste, they 
 were chained to a round of toil. A farmer 
 
QUEER FOLKS. 183 
 
 never cut a swath in liis field that he did not 
 have his eye on the edge of his scythe, lest it 
 be marred by a rock. Snowbound in winter, 
 in summer he had no spare time save that 
 which he took from sleep. The village lawyers, 
 who tried cases in so many counties, had no 
 leisure. The doctor almost lived in his sulky, a 
 peddler of medicine. Parson Meeker raised liis 
 OAvn corn and potatoes, and could do no more 
 than to hold once in a while a third service in 
 Doe's school-house, which was close by Drown 
 City. Mrs. Meeker, who spared no effort with 
 the people of Whitefield Corner, had no 
 strength left from her hardworked life to give 
 to the Ishmaelites of this desert. 
 
 Can you wonder, then, that, when there had 
 been a drunken fight at Drown City, the law- 
 abiding man of its adjacent village, who sat 
 with a tallow candle between his eyes and his 
 library-book, when told of it, simply looked 
 up and said, — " They are a godless set" ? 
 
 My dear children, the bad in country life is 
 to the good as a mote to a sunbeam. I yearn 
 to give you as a legacy what my pen has 
 tried to portray, a few examples of its old- 
 time, most worthy character. The mousing 
 lawyer ; the good deacon ; the splendid doc- 
 tor; the wise parson and his superior wife; 
 the quaint, bright old Farmer Lathem ; — in- 
 
184 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 
 
 deed, every man, woman, and child who have 
 slight!}^ greeted you in these pages are all real 
 persons, who lived their earthly lives in the 
 little villages of East Eoad and "Whitefieid 
 Corner. 
 
 I am hopeless of making you know them as 
 I know them, hut if they have for 3'ou that 
 significance which an old portrait sometimes 
 flashes down upon one from a wall, my lahor 
 has not heen in vain. It is easier to snatch 
 their pictures from the past, because an isola- 
 tion, which can never he repeated, made their 
 admirable lives spectacular. I have spoken 
 with delight of their integrity and other vir- 
 tues. Before I dismiss them I would like to 
 impress upon you the nature of that quality in 
 them called " faculty," supposed to be some- 
 what peculiar to Kew England people. 
 
 I can most easily do this by telling of a re- 
 membered Whitefieid business-man. Reared 
 on a rocky New England farm, one of eight 
 sons, all of whom grew into a vigorous and 
 creditable manhood, he had the simple boy- 
 hood of a farmhouse and such early education 
 as could be gotten from district-schools. A 
 born poet and scholar, he matured into a per- 
 son of refinement and culture. I have often 
 wondered what broader tuition mic^ht have 
 made of this man. lie seemed to me equal 
 
QUEER FOLKS. Igg 
 
 to almost anj' destiny, but under no circum- 
 stances could he have had a sweeter nature, 
 better taste, finer manners, or a warmer heart! 
 He was in action apt to be far beyond his 
 neighbors. Wliile others waited, he wrought. 
 With him rational desire meant achievement 
 Moving from Whitefield Corner for wider scope 
 to a larger village, he carried the materials of 
 a new home with him Its pins and mortises 
 and doors and windows had all been fitted in 
 Whitefield, and it sprung up like a mushroom 
 on the hill where he planted it. It was drawn 
 by thirty-nine yokes of oxen,— seventy-eight 
 ill all, six to each team, and their homely 
 procession, tramping out of Whitefield Cor- 
 ner before daylight, wakened all the sleepers 
 in the little village. 
 
 I have often thought of it as a picture 
 showing far better than any words can do the 
 invincible energy of the oldtime ]^ew Eng- 
 land country workers,— those men who struc^c 
 their axes into the forest-trees and their ploughs 
 into the earth, saying to the one. Give of your 
 strength, and to the other. Pour forth of your 
 flitness. The trees and the earth obeyed them, 
 because the will of the men was more potent 
 than nature's hidden forces. I know about 
 thatprocession,— how the teams creaked and 
 groaned, how the white beams glittered in the 
 
 13 
 
186 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 moonlight, and the monotonous cry of the team- 
 sters was heard long after it had disappeared 
 over the crest of the doctor's hill. From the 
 first stroke of an axe until the shaped timbers 
 started on their way, there had been hard work 
 in a chip-littered yard of Whitefield Corner, 
 Avhere curious villagers lingered to watch the 
 gradual birth of a house. There was some- 
 thing poetical about this. The drying sap sent 
 out sweet incense. The sound of labor was 
 soft-toned and rhythmical; the warm-tinted 
 chips lay lightly upon the snow; the beams 
 themselves mellowed in the sun. The grow- 
 ing of the thing gave an innocent diversion to 
 easily-pleased loiterers. By degrees the plan 
 of the man was hewn into the wood, and, 
 though it littered the ground, it was in reality 
 a closely fitting w^hole. Then one morning the 
 skeleton was gone, dragged away in the night- 
 time by the seventy-eight oxen. 
 
 The true hewer of this house — tlae one who 
 really shaped it — was the man who planned it, 
 who gave brains to the hands and direction to 
 edged tools, whose skill as an organizer might 
 have ruled armies, — a creative man, whose tire- 
 less energy was only equalled by his judgment. 
 
 Of all the country-livers which I have pre- 
 sented to you, he was, I think, the most sym- 
 metrica], the best representative man. The 
 
QUEER FOLKS. 187 
 
 Lord gave him length of days, and in liis de- 
 clining years this successful worker, as dis- 
 cerning and just as he had been strong, used 
 to sit in an office of his house, reverenced 
 and consulted as a wise judge. For a few 
 years at the end of his beautiful life he, for 
 some unseen purpose, was smitten with much 
 pain. This he conquered by patience, and I 
 remember with delight the last summer of 
 the splendid old man, which he spent mostly 
 on a veranda with his family about him, his 
 neighbors doing him homage, his intellect 
 bright, his aifections and sympathies alive to 
 this world, his soul ripe for another. 
 
 If, therefore, in your ^N'ew England travels 
 you stumble upon a shaggy man who talks of 
 a " chaw of terbacker" and almost spits in your 
 face, do not mistake him for a son of one of those 
 kings of the soil who ruled over the farms of 
 Whitefield in my ({i\y. If, likewise, you come 
 upon a cluster of homes without a meeting- 
 house, where the Sabbath is profaned, and its 
 people are hence coarse and ignorant, — if not 
 worse, — do not confound them with such coun- 
 try-people as I have known in the village of 
 Whitefield Corner. 
 
 I love that little village of Whitefield Cor- 
 ner. There is a chamber-window, turned 
 from its street, out of which in childhood I 
 
188 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 
 
 used to watch the sunset-gilded crown of Red 
 Mountain, and while sitting there I have 
 often thought that, in the afterglow of some 
 fortunate day, I would like to pass out of earth 
 into heaven. Until that day comes, my dears, 
 farewell ! 
 
 THE END. 
 
BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS VOLUME. 
 
 RECENTLY PUBLISHED. 
 
 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES, 
 
 12mo. Extra cloth. $1.25. 
 
 " The scenes and incidents are treated with the tenderness that 
 haunts all remembered childhood in a pleasant and long-forsaken 
 home." — Nation. 
 
 " Some of the pictures are worthy of an artist's pencil. It is a 
 book to take up in odd moments to smile over as it brings back 
 like incidents in one's own life, to weep over when remembering 
 that those days are gone and never can return." — iV. Y. Church wan, 
 
 " There is no literary pretence in it, but there is a sweet soul 
 that speaks in it, and a country charm about its memories that is 
 delightful." — Springfield Repuhlican. 
 
 " Will find and keep for itself a warm corner in many a thought- 
 ful reader's heart." — Philadelphia Times. 
 
 " The very unpretentiousness and simple, honest truth makes 
 the book charming." — Boston Advertiser. 
 
 " If a native of New England has any love for his country in 
 him, if lurking in some corner of his heart there is the smallest 
 soft spot, it will be touched by this natural and unassuming de- 
 scription of what sadly enough must be called the * Bygones.' " — 
 Boston Sunday Herald. 
 
 "A book that deserves to be placed among the classics of 
 American literature." — Philadelphia Eveniny Bulletin. 
 
" The present unpretending offering to the memory of bygone 
 days in New England bears so sincere a stamp of reality, is so 
 fragrant with the natural odors of apple-blossoms and sweet fern, 
 that it will win the sympathy of many readers, even among those 
 who are not familiar with the scenes which it describes." — N. Y. 
 Tribune. 
 
 "A true and pure love of nature, close observation, a retentive 
 memory, a highly sensitive and poetic nature, an artist's eye, and 
 a practised literary habit, have all been concerned in the produc- 
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 it reminds us of Emerson in his best descriptive vein. To all 
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 "'New England Bygones* is a boon to true sons and daughters 
 of the soil. It depicts oldtime characters and sketches with con- 
 summate instinct the scenes so common to our rural life; it is 
 general and individual; it brings home delightful memories: it 
 turns back the impetuous nature to cool, restful customs; it re- 
 stores reverence for the truly meritorious parts of the past; it 
 incites new love of fadeless nature; it stirs the emotional life to 
 sacred issues; it is more than its author meant; it will be bought 
 and read by hundreds whose daily careers will be nobler for the 
 influence it exerts; kept in the household, it will be a source of 
 recurrent pleasure, profit, and inspiration." — Boston Transcript. 
 
 " An interesting and well- written work. It is from such collec- 
 tions, embodying personal reminiscence, experience, and local 
 custom, that the future reader must derive his knowledge of that 
 most important of all histories, the history of the social life of a 
 people." — Sunday -School Times. 
 
 "It is educational in the best sense, while entertaining and re- 
 freshing. It is a book of descriptions and meditations, and it 
 cannot fail to stimulate a healthy love of nature and of simple 
 and sterling character." — The Congregationalist. 
 
 *-.:,* For sale by all Booksellers, or will be sent by mail, postpaid, 
 upon receipt of price by 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT& CO.. Publishers. 
 
 715 and T17 Market St., Philadelphia.