CHAPTER XIV

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN

During the first week in May the old Squire and grandmother Ruth made a trip to Portland, and when they came back, they brought, among other presents to us young folks at home, a glass jar of goldfish for Ellen.

In Ellen's early home, before the Civil War and before she came to the old Squire's to live, there had always been a jar of goldfish in the window, and afterwards at the old farm the girl had often remarked that she missed it. Well I remember the cry of joy she gave that day when grandmother stepped down from the wagon at the farmhouse door and, turning, took a glass jar of goldfish from under the seat.

"O grandmother!" she cried and fairly flew to take it from the old lady's hands.

Ellen had eyes for nothing else that evening, and as it grew dark she went time and again with a lamp to look at the fish and to drop in crumbs of cracker.

During the four days the old folks were away we had run free; games and jokes had been in full swing. There was still mischief in us, for the next morning when we came down to do the chores before any one else was up, Addison said:

"Let's have some fun with Nell; she'll be down here pretty quick. Get some fish poles and strings and bend up some pins for hooks and we'll pretend to be fishing in the jar!"

In a few minutes we each had rigged up a semblance of fishing tackle and were ready. When Ellen opened the sitting-room door a little later the sight that met her astonished eyes took her breath away. Addison was calmly fishing in the jar!

"What are you doing?" she cried. "My goldfish!"

Addison fled out of the room with Ellen in hot pursuit; she finally caught him, seized the rod and broke it. But when she turned back to see what damages her adored fish had suffered, she beheld Halstead, perched over the jar, also fishing in it.

"My senses! You here, too!" she cried. "Can't a boy see a fish without wanting to catch it?"

When she hurried back in a flurry of anxiety after chasing him to the carriage house, she found me there, too, pretending to yank one out. But by this time she saw that it was a joke, and the box on the ear that she gave me was not a very hard one.

"Seems to me, young folks, I heard quite too much noise down here for Sunday morning," grandmother said severely when she appeared a little later. "Such racing and running! You really must have better regard for the day."

Preparations for breakfast went on in a subdued manner, and we were sitting at table rather quietly when a caller appeared at the door—Mrs. Rufus Sylvester, who lived about a mile from us. Her face wore a look of anxiety.

"Squire," she exclaimed, "I implore you to come over and say something to Rufus! He's terrible downcast this morning. He went out to the barn, but he hasn't milked, nor done his chores. He's settin' out there with his face in his hands, groanin'. I'm afraid, Squire, he may try to take his own life!"

The old Squire rose from the table and led Mrs. Sylvester into the sitting-room; grandmother followed them and carefully shut the door behind her. We heard them speaking in low tones for some moments; then they came out, and both the old Squire and grandmother Ruth set off with Mrs. Sylvester.

"Is he ill?" Theodora whispered to grandmother as the old lady passed her.

"No, child; he is melancholy this spring," the old lady replied. "He is afraid he has committed the unpardonable sin."

The old folks and our caller left us finishing our breakfast, and I recollect that for some time none of us spoke. Our recent unseemly hilarity had vanished.

"What do you suppose Sylvester's done?" Halstead asked at last, with a glance at Theodora; then, as she did not seem inclined to hazard conjectures on that subject, he addressed himself to Addison, who was trying to extract a second cup of coffee from the big coffeepot.

"You know everything, Addison, or think you do. What is this unpardonable sin?"

"Cousin Halstead," Addison replied, not relishing the manner in which he had put the question, "you are likely enough to find that out for yourself if you don't mend some of your bad ways here."

Halstead flamed up and muttered something about the self-righteousness of a certain member of the family; but Theodora then remarked tactfully that, as nearly as she could understand it, the unpardonable sin is something we do that can never be forgiven.

Some months before Elder Witham had preached a sermon in which he had set forth the doctrine of predestination and the unpardonable sin, but I have to confess that none of us could remember what he had said.

"I think it's in the Bible," Theodora added, and, going into the sitting-room, she fetched forth grandmother Ruth's concordance Bible and asked Addison to help her find the references. Turning first to one text, then to another, for some minutes they read the passages aloud, but did not find anything conclusive. The discussion had put me in a rather disturbed state of mind in regard to several things I had done at one time and another, and I suppose I looked sober, for I saw Addison regarding me curiously. He continued to glance at me, clearly with intention, and shook his head gloomily several times until Ellen noticed it and exclaimed in my behalf, "Well, I guess he stands as good a chance as you do!"

Two hours or so later the old Squire and grandmother returned, thoughtfully silent; they did not tell us what had occurred, and it was not until a good many years later, when Theodora, Halstead and Addison had left the old farm, that I learned what had happened that morning at the Sylvester place. The old Squire and I were driving home from the village when something brought the incident to his mind, and, since I was now old enough to understand, he related what had occurred.

When they reached the Sylvester farm that morning grandmother went indoors with Mrs. Sylvester, and the old Squire proceeded to the barn. All was very dark and still there, and it was some moments before he discovered Rufus; the man was sitting on a heckling block at the far dark end of the barn, huddled down, with his head bowed in his hands.

"Good morning, neighbor!" the old Squire said cheerily. "A fine Sabbath morning. Spring never looked more promising for us."

Rufus neither stirred nor answered. The old Squire drew near and laid his hand gently on his shoulder.

"Is it something you could tell me about?" he asked.

Rufus groaned and raised two dreary eyes from his hands. "Oh, I can't! I'm 'shamed. It's nothin' I can tell!" he cried out miserably and then burst into fearful sobs.

"Don't let me ask, then, unless you think it might do you good," the old Squire said.

"Nothin'll ever do me any good again!" Rufus cried. "I'm beyond it, Squire. I'm a lost soul. The door of mercy is closed on me, Squire. I've committed the unpardonable sin!"

The old Squire saw that no effort to cheer Rufus that did not go to the root of his misery would avail. Sitting down beside him, he said:

"A great many of us sometimes fear that we have committed the unpardonable sin. But there is one sure way of knowing whether a person has committed it or not. I once knew a man who in a drunken brawl had killed another. He was convicted of manslaughter, served his term in prison, then went back to his farm and worked hard and well for ten years. One spring that former crime began to weigh on his mind. He brooded on it and finally became convinced that he had committed the sin for which there can be no forgiveness. He wanted desperately to atone for what he had done, and the idea got possession of his mind that since he had taken a human life the only way for him was to take his own life—a life for a life. The next morning they found that he had hanged himself in his barn.

"The young minister who was asked to officiate at the funeral declined to do so on doctrinal grounds; and the burial was about to take place without even a prayer at the grave when a stranger hurriedly approached. He was a celebrated divine who had heard the circumstances of the man's death and who had journeyed a hundred miles to offer his services at the burial.

"'My good friends,' the stranger began, 'I have come to rectify a great mistake. This poor fellow mortal whose body you are committing to its last resting place mistook the full measure of God's compassion. He believed that he had committed that sin for which there is no forgiveness. In his extreme anxiety to atone for his former crime, he was led to commit another, for God requires no man to commit suicide, and his Word expressly forbids it. My friends, I am here to-day to tell you that there is only one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and that is the sin which we do not repent. That alone is the unpardonable sin. This man was sincerely sorry for his sin, and I am as certain that God has forgiven him as I am that I am standing here by his grave.'"

As the old Squire spoke, Rufus raised his head, and a ray of hope broke across his woebegone face.

"Now the question is," the old Squire continued, "are you sorry for what you did?"

"Oh, yes, Squire, yes! I'm terribly sorry!" he cried eagerly. "I do repent of it! I never in the world would do such a thing again!"

"Then what you have done was not the unpardonable sin at all!" the old Squire exclaimed confidently.

"Do you think so?" Rufus cried imploringly.

"I know so!" the old Squire declared authoritatively. "Now let's feed those cows and your horse. Then we will go out and take a look at the fields where you are going to put in a crop this spring."

When the old Squire and grandmother Ruth came away the shadows at the Sylvester farm had visibly lifted, and life was resuming its normal course there. They had proceeded only a short distance on their homeward way, however, when they heard footsteps behind, and saw Rufus hastening after them bareheaded.

"Tell me, Squire, what d'ye think I ought to do about that—what I done once?" he cried.

"Well, Rufus," the old Squire replied, "that is a matter you must settle with your own conscience. Since you ask me, I should say that, if the wrong you did can be righted in any way, you had better try to right it."

"I will. I can. That's what I will do!" he exclaimed.

"I feel sure you will," the old Squire said; and Rufus went back, looking much relieved.

"Did you ever find out just what it was that Sylvester had done?" I asked.

"Well, never exactly," the old Squire replied, smiling. "But I made certain surmises. Less than a fortnight after my talk with Rufus our neighbors, the Wilburs, were astonished one morning to find that during the night a full barrel of salt pork had been set on their porch by the kitchen door. Every mark had been carefully scraped off the barrel, but on the top head were the words, printed with a lead pencil, 'This is yourn and I am sorry.'

"Fourteen years before, the Wilburs had lost a large hog very mysteriously. At that time domestic animals were allowed to run about much more freely than at present, and they often strayed along the highway. Sylvester was always in poor circumstances; and I believe that Wilbur's hog came along the road by night and that Rufus was tempted to make way with it privately and to conceal all traces of the theft.

"In spite of the words on the head of the barrel, Mr. Wilbur was in some doubt what to do with the pork and asked my advice. I told him that if I were in his place I should keep it and say nothing. But I didn't tell him of my talk with Sylvester about the unpardonable sin," the old gentleman added, smiling. "That was hardly a proper subject for gossip."



CHAPTER XV

THE CANTALOUPE COAXER

Every spring at the old farm we used to put in a row of hills for cantaloupes and another for watermelons. But, truth to say, our planting melons, like our efforts to raise peaches and grapes, was always more or less of a joke, for frosts usually killed the vines before the melons were half grown. Nevertheless, spring always filled us with fresh hope that the summer would prove warm, and that frosts would hold off until October. But we never really raised a melon fit for the table until the old Squire and Addison invented the "haymaker."

To make hay properly we thought we needed two successive days of sun. When rain falls nearly every day haying comes to a standstill, for if the mown grass is left in the field it blackens and rots; if it is drawn to the barn, it turns musty in the mow. Usually the sun does its duty, but once in a while there comes a summer in Maine when there is so much wet weather that it is nearly impossible to harvest the hay crop. Such a summer was that of 1868.

At the old farm our rule was to begin haying the day after the Fourth of July and to push the work as fast as possible, so as to get in most of the crop before dog-days. That summer I remember we had mowed four acres of grass on the morning of the fifth. But in the afternoon the sky clouded, the night turned wet, and the sun scarcely showed again for a week. A day and a half of clear weather followed; but showers came before the sodden swaths could be shaken up and the moisture dried out, and then dull or wet days followed for a week longer; that is, to the twenty-first of the month. Not a hundredweight of hay had we put into the barn, and the first hay we had mown had spoiled in the field.

At such times the northeastern farmer must keep his patience—if he can. The old Squire had seen Maine weather for many years and had learned the uselessness of fretting. He looked depressed, but merely said that Halstead and I might as well begin going to the district school with the girls.

In the summer we usually had to work on the farm during good weather, as boys of our age usually did in those days; but it was now too wet to hoe corn or to do other work in the field. We could do little except to wait for fair weather. Addison, who was older than I, did not go back to school and spent much of the time poring over a pile of old magazines up in the attic.

Halstead and I had been going to school for four or five days when on coming home one afternoon we found a great stir of activity round the west barn. Timbers and boards had been fetched from an old shed on the "Aunt Hannah lot"—a family appurtenance of the home farm—and lay heaped on the ground. Two of the hired men were laying foundation stones along the side of the barn. Addison, who had just driven in with a load of long rafters from the old Squire's mill on Lurvey's Stream, called to us to help him unload them.

"Why, what's going to be built?" we exclaimed.

"Haymaker," he replied shortly.

The answer did not enlighten us.

"'Haymaker'?" repeated Halstead wonderingly.

"Yes, haymaker," said Addison. "So bear a hand here. We've got to hurry, too, if we are to make any hay this year." He then told us that the old Squire had driven to the village six miles away, to get a load of hothouse glass. While we stood pondering that bit of puzzling information, a third hired man drove into the yard on a heavy wagon drawn by a span of work horses. On the wagon was the old fire box and the boiler of a stationary steam engine that we had had for some time in the shook shop a mile down the road.

We learned at supper that Addison and the old Squire, having little to do that day except watch the weather, had put their heads together and hatched a plan to make hay from freshly mown grass without the aid of the sun. I have always understood that the plan originated in something that Addison had read, or in some picture that he had seen in one of the magazines in the garret. But the old Squire, who had a spice of Yankee inventiveness in him, had improved on Addison's first notion by suggesting a glass roof, set aslant to a south exposure, so as to utilize the rays of the sun when it did shine.

The haymaker was simply a long shed built against the south side of the barn. The front and the ends were boarded up to a height of eight feet from the ground. At that height strong cedar cross poles were laid, six inches apart, so as to form a kind of rack, on which the freshly mown grass could be pitched from a cart.

The glass roof was put on as soon as the glass arrived; it slanted at an angle of perhaps forty degrees from the front of the shed up to the eaves of the barn. The rafters, which were twenty-six feet in length, were hemlock scantlings eight inches wide and two inches thick, set edgewise; the panes of glass, which were eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches long, were laid in rows upon the rafters like shingles. The space between the rack of poles and the glass roof was of course pervious to the sun rays and often became very warm. Three scuttles, four feet square, set low in the glass roof and guarded by a framework, enabled us to pitch the grass from the cart directly into the loft; and I may add here that the dried hay could be pitched into the haymow through apertures in the side of the barn.

That season the sun scarcely shone at all. The old fire box and boiler were needed most of the time. We installed the antiquated apparatus under the open floor virtually in the middle of the long space beneath, where it served as a hot-air furnace. The tall smoke pipe rose to a considerable height above the roof of the barn; and to guard against fire we carefully protected with sheet iron everything round it and round the fire box. As the boiler was already worn out and unsafe for steam, we put no water into it and made no effort to prevent the tubes from shrinking. For fuel we used slabs from the sawmill. The fire box and boiler gave forth a great deal of heat, which rose through the layer of grass on the poles.

The entire length of the loft was seventy-four feet, and the width was nineteen feet. We threw the grass in at the scuttles and spread it round in a layer about eighteen inches thick. As thus charged, the loft would hold about as much hay as grew on an acre. From four to seven hours were needed to make the grass into hay, but the time varied according as the grass was dry or green and damp when mown. Once in the haymaker it dried so fast that you could often see a cloud of steam rising from the scuttles in the glass roof, which had to be left partly open to make a draft from below.

Of course, we used artificial heat only in wet or cloudy weather. When the sun came out brightly we depended on solar heat. Perhaps half a day served to make a "charge" of grass into hay, if we turned it and shook it well in the loft. Passing the grass through the haymaker required no more work than making hay in the field in good weather.

In subsequent seasons when the sun shone nearly every day during haying time we used it less. But when thundershowers or occasional fogs or heavy dew came it was always open to us to put the grass through the haymaker. In a wet season it gave us a delightful feeling of independence. "Let it rain," the old Squire used to say with a smile. "We've got the haymaker."

Late in September the first fall after we built the haymaker, there came a heavy gale that blew off fully one half the apple crop—Baldwins, Greenings, Blue Pearmains and Spitzenburgs. Since we could barrel none of the windfalls as number one fruit, that part of our harvest, more than a thousand bushels, seemed likely to prove a loss. The old Squire would never make cider to sell; and we young folks at the farm, particularly Theodora and Ellen, disliked exceedingly to dry apples by hand.

But there lay all those fair apples. It seemed such a shame to let them go to waste that the matter was on all our minds. At the breakfast table one morning Ellen remarked that we might use the haymaker for drying apples if we only had some one to pare and slice them.

"But I cannot think of any one," she added hastily, fearful lest she be asked to do the work evenings.

"Nor can I," Theodora added with equal haste, "unless some of those paupers at the town farm could be set about it."

"Poor paupers!" Addison exclaimed, laughing. "Too bad!"

"Lazy things, I say!" grandmother exclaimed. "There's seventeen on the farm, and eight of them are abundantly able to work and earn their keep."

"Yes, if they only had the wit," the old Squire said; he was one of the selectmen that year, and he felt much solicitude for the town poor.

"Perhaps they've wit enough to pare apples," Theodora remarked hopefully.

"Maybe," the old Squire said in doubt. "So far as they are able they ought to work, just as those who have to support them must work."

The old Squire, after consulting with the two other selectmen, finally offered five of the paupers fifty cents a day and their board if they would come to our place and dry apples. Three of the five were women, one was an elderly man, and the fifth was a not over-bright youngster of eighteen. So far from disliking the project all five hailed it with delight.

Having paupers round the place was by no means an unmixed pleasure. We equipped them with apple parers, corers and slicers and set them to work in the basement of the haymaker. Large trays of woven wire were prepared to be set in rows on the rack overhead. It was then October; the fire necessary to keep the workers warm was enough to dry the trays of sliced apples almost as fast as they could be filled.

For more than a month the five paupers worked there, sometimes well, sometimes badly. They dried nearly two tons of apples, which, if I remember right, brought six cents a pound that year. The profit from that venture alone nearly paid for the haymaker.

The weather was bright the next haying time, so bright indeed that it was scarcely worth while to dry grass in the haymaker; and the next summer was just as sunny. It was in the spring of that second year that Theodora and Ellen asked whether they might not put their boxes of flower seeds and tomato seeds into the haymaker to give them an earlier start, for the spring suns warmed the ground under the glass roof while the snow still lay on the ground outside. In Maine it is never safe to plant a garden much before the middle of May; but we sometimes tried to get an earlier start by means of hotbeds on the south side of the farm buildings. In that way we used to start tomatoes, radishes, lettuce and even sweet corn, early potatoes, carrots and other vegetables, and then transplanted them to the open garden when settled warm weather came.

The girls' suggestion gave us the idea of using the haymaker as a big hothouse. The large area under glass made the scheme attractive. On the 2d of April we prepared the ground and planted enough garden seeds of all kinds to produce plants enough for an acre of land. The plants came up quickly and thrived and were successfully transplanted. A great victory was thus won over adverse nature and climate. We had sweet corn, green peas and everything else that a large garden yields a fortnight or three weeks earlier than we ever had had them before, and in such abundance that we were able to sell the surplus profitably at the neighboring village.

The sweet corn, tomatoes and other vegetables were transplanted to the outer garden early in June. Addison then suggested that we plant the ground under the haymaker to cantaloupes, and on the 4th of June we planted forty-five hills with seed.

The venture proved the most successful of all. The melon plants came up as well as they could have done in Colorado or Arizona. It is astonishing how many cantaloupes will grow on a plot of ground seventy-four feet long by nineteen feet wide. On the 16th of September we counted nine hundred and fifty-four melons, many of them large and nearly all of them yellow and finely ripened! They had matured in ninety days.

In fact, the crop proved an "embarrassment of riches." We feasted on them ourselves and gave to our neighbors, and yet our store did not visibly diminish. The county fair occurred on September 22 that fall; and Addison suggested loading a farm wagon—one with a body fifteen feet long—with about eight hundred of the cantaloupes and tempting the public appetite—at ten cents a melon. The girls helped us to decorate the wagon attractively with asters, dahlias, goldenrod and other autumn flowers, and they lined the wagon body with paper. It really did look fine, with all those yellow melons in it. We hired our neighbor, Tom Edwards, who had a remarkably resonant voice, to act as a "barker" for us.

The second day of the fair—the day on which the greatest crowd usually attends—we arrived with our load at eight o'clock in the morning, took up a favorable position on the grounds and cut a couple of melons in halves to show how yellow and luscious they were.

"All ready, now, Tom!" Addison exclaimed when our preparations were made. "Let's hear you earn that two dollars we've got to pay you."

Walking round in circles, Tom began:

"Muskmelons! Muskmelons grown under glass! Home-grown muskmelons! Maine muskmelons grown under a glass roof! Sweet and luscious! Only ten cents! Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see what your old native state can do—under glass! Walk up, young fellows, and treat your girls! Don't be stingy! Only ten cents apiece—and one of these luscious melons will treat three big girls or five little ones! A paper napkin with every melon! Don't wait! They are going fast! All be gone before ten o'clock! Try one and see what the old Pine Tree State will do—under glass!"

That is far from being the whole of Tom's "ballyhoo." Walking round and round in ever larger circles, he constantly varied his praises and his jokes. But the melons were their own best advertisement. All who bought them pronounced them delicious; and frequently they bought one or two more to prove to their friends how good they were.

At ten o'clock we still had a good many melons; but toward noon business became very brisk, and at one o'clock only six melons were left.

In honor of this crop we rechristened the old haymaker the "cantaloupe coaxer."



CHAPTER XVI

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF GRANDPA EDWARDS

There was so much to do at the old farm that we rarely found time to play games. But we had a croquet set that Theodora, Ellen and their girl neighbor, Catherine Edwards, occasionally carried out to a little wicketed court just east of the apple house in the rear of the farm buildings.

Halstead rather disdained the game as too tame for boys and Addison so easily outplayed the rest of us that there was not much fun in it for him, unless, as Theodora used to say, he played with one hand in his pocket. But as we were knocking the balls about one evening while we decided which of us should play, we saw Catherine crossing the west field. She had heard our voices and was making haste to reach us. As she approached, we saw that she looked anxious.

"Has grandpa been over here to-day?" her first words were. "He's gone. He went out right after breakfast this morning, and he hasn't come back.

"After he went out, Tom saw him down by the line wall," she continued hurriedly. "We thought perhaps he had gone to the Corners by the meadow-brook path. But he didn't come to dinner. We are beginning to wonder where he is. Tom's just gone to the Corners to see if he is there."

"Why, no," we said. "He hasn't been here to-day."

The two back windows at the rear of the kitchen were down, and Ellen, who was washing dishes there, overheard what Catherine had said, and spoke to grandmother Ruth, who called the old Squire.

"That's a little strange," he said when Catherine had repeated her tidings to him. "But I rather think it is nothing serious. He may have gone on from the Corners to the village. I shouldn't worry."

Grandpa Jonathan Edwards—distantly related to the stern New England divine of that name—was a sturdy, strong old man sixty-seven years of age, two years older than our old Squire, and a friend and neighbor of his from boyhood. With this youthful friend, Jock, the old Squire—who then of course was young—had journeyed to Connecticut to buy merino sheep: that memorable trip when they met with Anice and Ruth Pepperill, the two girls whom they subsequently married and brought home.

For the last seventeen years matters had not been going prosperously or happily at the Edwards farm. Jonathan's only son, Jotham (Catherine and Tom's father), had married at the age of twenty and come home to live. The old folks gave him the deed of the farm and accepted only a "maintenance" on it—not an uncommon mode of procedure. Quite naturally, no doubt, after taking the farm off his father's hands, marrying and having a family of his own, this son, Jotham, wished to manage the farm as he saw fit. He was a fairly kind, well-meaning man, but he had a hasty temper and was a poor manager. His plans seemed never to prosper, and the farm ran down, to the great sorrow and dissatisfaction of his father, Jonathan, whose good advice was wholly disregarded. The farm lapsed under a mortgage; the buildings went unrepaired, unpainted; and the older man experienced the constant grief of seeing the place that had been so dear to him going wrong and getting into worse condition every year.

Of course we young folks did not at that time know or understand much about all this; but I have learned since that Jonathan often unbosomed his troubles to the old Squire, who sympathized with him, but who could do little to improve matters.

Jotham's wife was a worthy woman, and I never heard that she did not treat the old folks well. It was the bad management and the constantly growing stress of straitened circumstances that so worried Jonathan.

Then, two years before we young folks came home to live at the old Squire's, Aunt Anice, as the neighbors called her, died suddenly of a sharp attack of pleurisy. That left Jonathan alone in the household of his son and family. He seemed, so the old Squire told me later, to lose heart entirely after that, and sat about or wandered over the farm in a state of constant discontent.

I fear, too, that his grandson, Tom, was not an unmixed comfort to him. Tom did not mean to hurt his grandfather's feelings. He was a good-hearted boy, but impetuous and somewhat hasty. More than once we heard him go on to tell what great things he meant to do at home, "after grandpa dies." Grandpa, indeed, may sometimes have heard him say that; and it is the saddest, most hopeless thing in life for elderly people to come to see that the younger generation is only waiting for them to die. If Grandpa Edwards had been very infirm, he might not have cared greatly; but, as I have said, at sixty-seven he was still hale and, except for a little rheumatism, apparently well.

Tom came home from the Corners that night without having learned anything of Grandpa Edwards's whereabouts. In the course of the evening his disappearance became known throughout the vicinity. The first conjectures were that he had set off on a visit somewhere and would soon return. Paying visits was not much after his manner of life; yet his family half believed that he had gone off to cheer himself up a bit. Jotham and his wife, and Catherine, too, now remembered that he had been unusually silent for a week. A search of the room he occupied showed that he had gone away wearing his every-day clothes. I remember that the old Squire and grandmother Ruth looked grave but said very little. Grandpa Edwards was not the kind of man to get lost. Of course he might have had a fall while tramping about and injured himself seriously or even fatally; but neither was that likely.

For several days, therefore, his family and his neighbors waited for him to return of his own accord. But when a week or more passed and he did not come anxiety deepened; and his son and the neighbors bestirred themselves to make wider inquiries. Tardily, at last, a considerable party searched the woods and the lake shores; and finally as many as fifty persons turned out and spent a day and a night looking for him.

"They will not find him," the old Squire remarked with a kind of sad certainty; and he did not join the searchers himself or encourage us boys to do so. I think that both he and grandmother Ruth partly feared that, as the old lady quaintly expressed it, "Jonathan had been left to take his own life," in a fit of despondency.

The disappearance was so mysterious, indeed, and some people thought so suspicious, that the town authorities took it up. The selectmen came to the Edwards farm and made careful inquiries into all the circumstances in order to make sure there had been nothing like wrongdoing. There was not, however, the least circumstance to indicate anything of that kind. Grandfather Jonathan had walked away no one knew where; Jotham and his wife knew no more than their neighbors. They did not know what to think. Perhaps they feared they had not treated their father well. They said little, but Catherine and Tom talked of it in all innocence. Supposed clues were reported, but they led to nothing and were soon abandoned. The baffling mystery of it remained and throughout that entire season cast its shadow on the community. It passed from the minds of us young people much sooner than from the minds of our elders. In the rush of life we largely ceased to think of it; but I am sure it was often in the thoughts of the old Squire and grandmother. With them months and even years made little difference in their sense of loss, for no tidings came—none at least that were ever made public; but thereby hangs the strangest part of this story.

The old Squire, as I have often said, was a lumberman as well as a farmer. For a number of years he was in company with a Canadian at Three Rivers in the Province of Quebec, and had lumber camps on the St. Maurice River as well as nearer home in Maine. After the age of seventy-three he gave up active participation in the Quebec branch of the business, but still retained an interest in it; and this went on for ten years or more. The former partner in Canada then died, and the business had to be wound up.

Long before that time Theodora, Halstead and finally Ellen had left home and gone out into the world for themselves, and as the old Squire was now past eighty we did not quite like to have him journey to Canada. He was still alert, but after an attack of rheumatic fever in the winter of 1869 his heart had disclosed slight defects; it was safer for him not to exert himself so vigorously as formerly; and as the partnership had to be terminated legally he gave me the power of attorney to go to Three Rivers and act for him.

I was at a sawmill fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French habitant of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther away was an acre of ripening oats and another of potatoes. A Jersey cow with her tinkling bell was feeding at the borders of the clearing. Such evidences of care and thrift were so unusual in that northerly region that I spoke of it to my driver.

"Ah, heem ole Yarnkee man," the habitant said. "Heem work all time."

As if in confirmation of this remark an aged man, hearing our wheels, rose suddenly in the garden where he was weeding, with his face toward us. Something strangely familiar in his looks at once riveted my attention. I bade the driver stop and, jumping out, climbed the log fence inclosing the garden and approached the old man.

"Isn't your name Edwards—Jonathan Edwards?" I exclaimed.

He stood for some moments regarding me without speaking. "Wal, they don't call me that here," he said at last, still regarding me fixedly.

I told him then who I was and how I had come to be there. I was not absolutely certain that it was Grandpa Edwards, yet I felt pretty sure. His hair was a little whiter and his face somewhat more wrinkled; yet he had changed surprisingly little. His hearing, too, did not appear to be much impaired, and he was doing a pretty good job of weeding without glasses.

I could see that he was in doubt about admitting his identity to me. "It is only by accident I saw you," I said. "I did not come to find you."

Still he did not speak and seemed disinclined to do so, or to admit anything about himself. I was sorry that I had stopped to accost him, but now that I had done so I went on quite as a matter of course to give him tidings of the old Squire and of grandmother Ruth. "They are both living and well; they speak of you at times," I said. "Your disappearance grieved them. I don't think they ever blamed you."

His face worked strangely; his hands, grasping the hoe handle, shook; but still he said nothing.

"Have you ever had word from your folks at the old farm?" I asked him at length. "Have you had any news of them at all?"

He shook his head. I then informed him that his son Jotham had died four years before; that Tom had gone abroad as an engineer; that Catherine was living at home, managing the old place and doing it well; that she had paid off the mortgage and was prospering.

He listened in silence; but his face worked painfully at times.

As I was speaking an elderly woman came to the door of the house and stood looking toward us.

"That is my wife," he said, noticing that I saw her. "She is a good woman. She takes good care of me."

I felt that it would be unkind to press him further and turned to go.

"Would you like to send any word to your folks or to grandmother and the old Squire?" I asked.

"Better not," said he with a kind of solemn sullenness. "I am out of all that. I'm the same's dead."

I could see that he wished it so. He had not really and in so many words acknowledged his identity; but when I turned to go he followed me to the log fence round the garden and as I got over grasped my hand and held on for the longest time! I thought he would never let go. His hand felt rather cold. I suppose the sight of me and the home speech brought his early life vividly back to him. He swallowed hard several times without speaking, and again I saw his wrinkled face working. He let go at last, went heavily back and picked up his hoe; and as we drove on I saw him hoeing stolidly.

The driver said that he had cleared up the little farm and built the log house and barn all by his own labor. For five years he had lived alone, but later he had married the widow of a Scotch immigrant. I noticed that this French-Canadian driver called him "M'sieur Andrews." It would seem that he had changed his name and begun anew in the world—or had tried to. How far he had succeeded I am unable to say.

I could not help feeling puzzled as well as depressed. The proper course under such circumstances is not wholly clear. Had his former friends a right to know what I had discovered? Right or wrong, what I decided on was to say nothing so long as the old man lived. Three years afterwards I wrote to a person whose acquaintance I had made at Three Rivers, asking him whether an old American, residing at a place I described, were still living, and received a reply saying that he was and apparently in good health. But two years later this same Canadian acquaintance, remembering my inquiry, wrote to say that the old man I had once asked about had just died, but that his widow was still living at their little farm and getting along as well as could be expected.

Then one day as the old Squire and I were driving home from a grange meeting I told him what I had learned five years before concerning the fate of his old friend. It was news to him, and yet he did not appear to be wholly surprised.

"I don't know, sir, whether I have done right or not, keeping this from you so long," I said after a moment of silence.

"I think you did perfectly right," the old Squire said after a pause. "You did what I myself, I am sure, would have done under the circumstances."

"Shall you tell grandmother Ruth?" I asked.

The old Squire considered it for several moments before he ventured to speak again. At last he lifted his head.

"On the whole I think it will be better if we do not," he replied. "It will give her a great shock, particularly Jonathan's second marriage up there in Canada. His disappearance has now largely faded from her mind. It is best so.

"Not that I justify it," he continued. "I think really that he did a shocking thing. But I understand it and overlook it in him. He bore his life there with Jotham just as long as he could. Jock had that kind of temperament. After Anice died there was nothing to keep him there.

"The fault was not all with Jotham," the old Squire continued reflectively. "Jotham was just what he was, hasty, willful and a poor head for management. No, the real fault was in the mistake in giving up the farm and all the rest of the property to Jotham when he came home to live. Jonathan should have kept his farm in his own hands and managed it himself as long as he was well and retained his faculties. True, Jotham was an only child and very likely would have left home if he couldn't have had his own way; but that would have been better, a thousand times better, than all the unhappiness that followed.

"No," the old Squire said again with conviction, "I don't much believe in elderly people's deeding away their farms or other businesses to their sons as long as they are able to manage them for themselves. It is a very bad method and has led to a world of trouble."

The old gentleman stopped suddenly and glanced at me.

"My boy, I quite forgot that you are still living at home with me and perhaps are beginning to think that it is time you had a deed of the old farm," he said in an apologetic voice.

"No, sir!" I exclaimed vehemently, for I had learned my lesson from what I had seen up in Canada. "You keep your property in your own hands as long as you live. If you ever see symptoms in me of wanting to play the Jotham, I hope that you will put me outside the house door and shut it on me!"

The old Squire laughed and patted my shoulder affectionately.

"Well, I'm eighty-three now, you know," he said slowly. "It can hardly be such a very great while."

I shook my head by way of protest, for the thought was an exceedingly unpleasant one.

However, the old gentleman only laughed again.

"No, it can hardly be such a very great while," he repeated.

But he lived to be ninety-eight, and I can truly say that those last years with him at the old farm, going about or driving round together, were the happiest of my life.



CHAPTER XVII

OUR FOURTH OF JULY AT THE DEN

Farm work as usual occupied us quite closely during May and June that year; and ere long we began to think of what we would do on the approaching Fourth of July. So far as we could hear, no public celebration was being planned either at the village in our own town, or in any of the towns immediately adjoining. Apparently we would have to organize our own celebration, if we had one; and after talking the matter over with the other young folks of the school district, we decided to celebrate the day by making a picnic excursion to the "Den," and carrying out a long contemplated plan for exploring it.

The Den was a pokerish cavern near Overset Pond, nine or ten miles to the northeast of the old Squire's place, about which clung many legends.

In the spring of 1839 a large female panther is said to have been trapped there, and an end made of her young family. Several bears, too, had been surprised inside the Den, for the place presented great attractions as a secure retreat from winter cold. But the story that most interested us was a tradition that somewhere in the recesses of the cave the notorious Androscoggin Indian Adwanko had hidden a bag of silver money that he had received from the French for the scalps of white settlers.

The entrance to the cave fronts the pond near the foot of a precipitous mountain, called the Fall-off. A wilder locality, or one of more sinister aspect, can hardly be imagined. The cave is not spacious within; it is merely a dark hole among great granite rocks. By means of a lantern or torch you can penetrate to a distance of seventy feet or more.

One day when three of us boys had gone to Overset Pond to fish for trout we plucked up our courage and crawled into it. We crept along for what seemed to us a great distance till we found the passage obstructed by a rock that had apparently fallen from overhead. We could move the stone a little, but we did not dare to tamper with it much, for fear that other stones from above would fall. We believed that Adwanko's bag of silver was surely in some recess beyond the rock and at once began to lay plans for blasting out the stone with powder. By using a long fuse, the person that fired the charge would have time to get out before the explosion.

Our party drove there in five double-seated wagons as far as Moose-Yard Brook, where we left the teams and walked the remaining two miles through the woods to Overset Pond. Besides five of us from the old Squire's, there were our two young neighbors, Thomas and Catherine Edwards, Willis Murch and his older brother, Ben, the two Darnley boys, Newman and Rufus, their sister, Adriana, and ten or twelve other young people.

Besides luncheon baskets and materials to make lemonade, we had taken along axes, two crowbars, two lanterns, four pounds of blasting powder and three feet of safety fuse. My cousin Addison had also brought a hammer, drill and "spoon." The girls were chiefly interested in the picnic; but we boys were resolved to see what was in the depths of the cave, and immediately on reaching the place several of us lighted the lanterns and went in.

At no place could we stand upright. Apparently some animal had wintered there, for the interior had a rank odor; but we crawled on over rocks until we came to the obstructing stone sixty or seventy feet from the entrance.

We had planned to drill a hole in the rock, blast it into pieces, and thus clear a passage to what lay beyond it. On closer inspection, however, we found that it was almost impossible to set the drill and deal blows with the hammer. But the stone rested on another rock, and we believed that we could push powder in beneath it and so get an upward blast that would heave the stone either forward or backward, or perhaps even break it in halves. We therefore set to work, thrusting the powder far under the stone with a blunt stick, until we had a charge of about four pounds. When we had connected the fuse we heaped sand about the base of the stone, to confine the powder.

The blast was finally ready; and then the question who should fire it arose. The three feet of fuse would, we believed, give two full minutes for whoever lighted it to get out of the Den; but fuse sometimes burns faster than is expected, and the safety fuse made in those days was not so uniform in quality as that of present times. At first no one seemed greatly to desire the honor of touching it off. The boys stood and joked one another about it, while the girls looked on from a safe distance.

"I shan't feel offended if any one gets ahead of me," Addison remarked carelessly.

"I'd just as soon have some one else do it," Ben said, smiling.

I had no idea of claiming the honor myself. Finally, after more bantering, Rufus Darnley cried, "Who's afraid? I'll light it. Two minutes is time enough to get out."

Rufus was not largely endowed with mother wit, or prudence. His brother Newman and his sister Adriana did not like the idea of his setting off the blast—in fact, none of us did; but Rufus wanted to show off a bit, and he insisted upon going in. Thereupon Ben, the oldest of the young fellows present, said quietly that he would go in with Rufus and light the fuse himself while Rufus held the lantern.

"I'll shout when I touch the match to the fuse," he said, "so that you can get away from the mouth of the cave."

They crept in, and the rest of us stood round, listening for the signal. Several minutes passed, and we wondered what could be taking them so long. At last there came a muffled shout, and all of us, retreating twenty or thirty yards, watched for Ben and Rufus to emerge. Some of us were counting off the seconds. We could hear Ben and Rufus coming, climbing over the rocks. Then suddenly there was an outcry and the sound of tinkling glass. At the same instant Ben emerged, but immediately turned and went back into the cave.

"Hurry, Rufe!" we heard him call out. "What's the matter? Hurry, or it will go off!"

Consternation fell on us, and some of us started for the mouth of the cave; but before we had gone more than five paces Ben sprang forth. He had not dared to remain an instant longer—and, indeed, he was scarcely outside when the explosion came. It sounded like a heavy jolt deep inside the mountain.

To our horror a huge slab of rock, thirty or forty feet up the side of the Fall-off, started to slide with a great crunching and grinding; then, gathering momentum, it plunged down between us and the mouth of the cave and completely shut the opening from view. Powder smoke floated up from behind the slab.

There was something so terrible in the suddenness of the catastrophe that the whole party seemed crazed. The boys, shouting wildly, swarmed about the fallen rock; the girls ran round, imploring us to get Rufus out. Rufus's sister Adriana, beside herself with terror, was screaming; and we could hardly keep Newman Darnley from attacking Ben Murch, who, he declared, should have brought Rufus out!

At first we were afraid that the explosion had killed Rufus; but almost immediately we heard muffled cries for help from the cave. He was still alive, but we had no way of knowing how badly he was hurt. Adriana fairly flew from one to another, beseeching us to save him.

"He's dying! He's under the rocks!" she screamed. "Oh, why don't you get him out?"

With grave faces Willis, Ben, Addison and Thomas peered round the fallen rock and cast about for some means of moving it.

"We must pry it away!" Thomas exclaimed. "Let's get a big pry!"

"We can't move that rock!" Ben declared. "We shall have to drill it and blast it."

But we had used all the powder and fuse, and it would take several hours to get more. Ben insisted, however, on sending Alfred Batchelder for the powder, and then, seizing the hammer and drill, he began to drill a hole in the side of the rock.

Thomas, however, still believed that we could move the rock by throwing our united weight on a long pry; and many of the boys agreed with him. We felled a spruce tree seven inches in diameter, trimmed it and cut a pry twenty feet long from it. Carrying it to the rock, we set a stone for a fulcrum, and then threw our weight repeatedly on the long end. The rock, which must have weighed ten tons or more, scarcely stirred. Ben laughed at us scornfully and went on drilling.

All the while Adriana stood weeping, and the other girls were shedding tears in sympathy. Rufus's distressed cries came to our ears, entreating us to help him and saying something that we could not understand about his leg.

As Addison stood racking his brain for some quicker way of moving the rock he remembered a contrivance, called a "giant purchase," that he had heard of lumbermen's using to break jams of logs on the Androscoggin River. He had never seen one and had only the vaguest idea how it worked. All he knew was that it consisted of an immense lever, forty feet long, laid on a log support and hauled laterally to and fro by horses. He knew that you could thus get a titanic application of power, for if the long arm of the lever were forty feet long and the short arm four feet, the strength of three horses pulling on the long arm would be increased tenfold—that is, the power of thirty horses would be applied against the object to be moved.

Addison explained his plan to the rest of us. He sent Thomas and me to lead several of our horses up through the woods to the pond. We ran all the way; and we took the whippletrees off the double wagons, and brought all the spare rope halters. Within an hour we were back there with four of the strongest horses.

Meanwhile the others had been busy; even Ben had been persuaded to drop his drilling and to help the other boys cut the great lever—a straight spruce tree forty or forty-five feet tall. The girls, too, had worked; they had even helped us drag the two spruce logs for the lever to slide on. In fact, every one had worked with might and main in a kind of breathless anxiety, for Rufus's very life seemed to be hanging on the success of our exertions.

A few feet to the left of the fallen rock was another boulder that served admirably for a fulcrum, and before long we had the big lever in place with the end of the short arm bearing against the fallen slab. When we had attached the horses to the farther end, Addison gave the word to start. As the horses gathered themselves for the pull we watched anxiously. The great log lever, which was more than a foot in diameter, bent visibly as they lunged forward.

Every eye was now on the rock, and when it moved,—for move it did,—such a cry of joy rose as the shores of that little pond had never echoed before! The great slab ground heavily against the other rocks, but moved for three or four feet, exposing in part the mouth of the cave—the same little dark chink that affords entrance to the Den to-day.

Other boulders prevented the rock from moving farther, and, although the horses surged at the lever, and we boys added our strength, the slab stuck fast; but an aperture twenty inches wide had been uncovered, wide enough to enable any one to enter the Den.

Ben, Willis and Edgar Wilbur crept in, followed by Thomas with a lantern; and after a time they brought Rufus out. We learned then that in his haste after the fuse was lighted he had fallen over one of the large rocks and, striking his leg on another stone, had broken the bone above the knee. He suffered not a little when the boys were drawing him out at the narrow chink beside the rock; but he was alive, and that was a matter for thankfulness.

Thomas went back to get the lantern that Rufus had dropped. It had fallen into a crevice between two large rocks, and while searching for it Thomas found another lantern there, of antique pattern. It was made of tin and was perforated with holes to emit the light; it seemed very old. Underneath where it lay Thomas also discovered a man's waistcoat, caked and sodden by the damp. In one pocket was a pipe, a rusted jackknife and what had once been a piece of tobacco. In the other pocket were sixteen large, old, red copper cents, one of which was a "boobyhead" cent.

We never discovered to whom that treasure-trove belonged. It could hardly have been Adwanko's, for one of the copper cents bore the date of 1830. Perhaps the owner of it had been searching for Adwanko's money; but why he left his lantern and waistcoat behind him remains a mystery. Our chief care was now for Rufus. We made a litter of poles and spruce boughs, and as gently as we could carried the sufferer through the woods down to the wagons, and slowly drove him home. Seven or eight weeks passed before he was able to walk again, even with the aid of a crutch.

Our plan of exploring the Den had been wholly overshadowed. We even forgot the luncheon baskets; and no one thought of ascertaining what the blast had accomplished. When we went up to the cave some months later we found that the blast had done very little; it had moved the rock slightly, but not enough to open the passage; and so it remains to this day. Old Adwanko's scalp money is still there—if it ever was there; but it is my surmise that the cruel redskin is much more likely to have spent his blood money for rum than to have left it behind him in the Den.



CHAPTER XVIII

JIM DOANE'S BANK BOOK

During the month of June that summer there was a very ambiguous affair at our old place.

Nowadays, if you lose your savings-bank book all you have to do is to notify the bank to stop payment on it. In many other ways, too, depositors are now safeguarded from loss. Forty years ago, however, when savings banks were newer and more autocratic, it was different. The bank book was then something tremendously important, or at least depositors thought so.

When the savings bank at the village, six miles from the old home farm in Maine, first opened for business, Mr. Burns, the treasurer, gave each new depositor a sharp lecture. He was a large man with a heavy black beard; as he handed the new bank book to the depositor, he would say in a dictatorial tone:

"Now here is your bank book." What emphasis he put on those words! "It shows you what you have at the bank. Don't fold it. Don't crumple it. Don't get it dirty. But above all things don't lose it, or let it be stolen from you. If you do, you may lose your entire deposit. We cannot remember you all. Whoever brings your book here may draw out your money. So put this book in a safe place, and keep a sharp eye on it. Remember every word I have told you, or we will not be responsible."

The old Squire encouraged us to have a nest egg at the bank, and by the end of the year there were seven bank books at the farm, all carefully put away under lock and key, in fact there were nine, counting the two that belonged to our hired men, Asa and Jim Doane. Acting on the old Squire's exhortation to practise thrift, they vowed that they would lay up a hundred dollars a year from their wages. The Doanes had worked for us for three or four years. Asa was a sturdy fellow of good habits; but Jim, his younger brother, had a besetting sin. About once a month, sometimes oftener, he wanted a playday; we always knew that he would come home from it drunk, and that we should have to put him away in some sequestered place and give him a day in which to recover.

For two or three days afterwards Jim would be the meekest, saddest, most shamefaced of human beings. At table he would scarcely look up; and there is not the least doubt that his grief and shame were genuine. Yet as surely as the months passed the same feverish restlessness would again show itself in him.

We came to recognize Jim's symptoms only too well, and knew, when we saw them, that he would soon have to have another playday. In fact, if the old Squire refused to let him off on such occasions, Jim would get more and more restless and two or three nights afterwards would steal away surreptitiously.

"Jim's a fool!" his brother, Asa, often said impatiently. "He isn't fit to be round here."

But the Squire steadily refused to turn Jim off. Many a time the old gentleman sat up half the night with the returned and noisy prodigal. A word from the Squire would calm Jim for the time and would occasionally call forth a burst of repentant tears. Jim's case, indeed, was one of the causes that led us at the old farm so bitterly to hate intoxicants.

That, however, is the dark side of Jim's infirmity; one of its more amusing sides was his bank book. When Jim was himself, as we used to say of him, he wanted to do well and to thrive like Asa, and he asked the old Squire to hold back ten dollars from his wages every month and to deposit it for him in the new savings bank. Mindful of his infirmity, Jim gave his bank book to grandmother to keep for him.

"Hide it," he used to say to her. "Even if I come and want it, don't you let me have it."

That was when Jim was himself; but when he had gone for a playday, he came rip-roariously home, time and again, and demanded his book, to get more money for drink. The scrimmages that grandmother had with him about that book would have been highly ludicrous if a vein of tragedy had not run underneath them.

One cause of Jim's inconsistent behavior about his bank account was the bad company he fell into on his playdays. After he had imbibed somewhat, those boon companions would urge him to go home and get his bank book; for under the influence of drink Jim was a noisy talker and likely to boast of his savings.

None of us, except grandmother, knew where Jim's bank book was, and after one memorable experience with him the old lady always disappeared when she saw him drive in. The second time, Jim actually searched the house for his book; but grandmother had taken it and stolen away to a neighbor's house. Once or twice afterwards Jim came and searched for his book; and I remember that the old Squire had doubts whether it was best for us to withhold it from him. Grandmother, however, had no such scruples.

"He shan't have it! Those rum sellers shan't get it from him!" she exclaimed.

When he had recovered from the effects of his playday Jim was always fervently glad that he had not spent his savings.

But his bad habits rapidly grew on him, and we fully expected that his savings, which, thanks to grandmother's resolute efforts, now amounted to nearly four hundred dollars, would eventually be squandered on drink.

"It's no use," Addison often said. "It will all go that way in the end, and the more there is of it the worse will be the final crash."

Others thought so, too—among them Miss Wilma Emmons, who taught the district school that summer. Miss Emmons was tall, slight and pale, with dark hair and large light-blue eyes. She would have been very pretty except for her very high, narrow forehead that not even her hair, combed low, could prevent from being noticeable. She made you feel that she was constantly intent on something that worried her.

As time passed, we came to learn the cause of her anxiety. She had two brothers, younger than herself, bright, promising boys whom she was trying to help through college. The three were orphans, without means; and Wilma was working hard, summer and winter, at anything and everything that offered profit, in an effort to give those boys a liberal education; besides teaching school, she went round the countryside in all weathers selling books, maps and sewing machines. Her devotion to those brothers was of course splendid, yet I now think that Wilma, temperamental and overworked, had let it become a kind of monomania with her.

A few days after she came to board at the old Squire's—all the school-teachers boarded there—Addison said to me that he wondered what that girl had on her mind.

As the summer passed, Wilma Emmons came to know our affairs at the old farm very well, and of course heard about Jim and his bank book. Jim, in fact, had taken one of his playdays soon after she came; and grandmother asked Wilma to lock the book up in the drawer of her desk at the schoolhouse for a few days.

It was quite like Jim Doane's impulsive nature, already somewhat unbalanced by intoxicants, to be greatly attracted to the reserved Miss Emmons. Out by the garden gate one morning he rather foolishly made his admiration known to her. Addison and I were weeding a strawberry bed just inside the fence and could not avoid overhearing something of what passed.

Astonished and a little indignant, too, perhaps, Miss Emmons told Jim that a young man of his habits had no right to address himself in such a manner to any young woman.

"But I can reform!" Jim said.

"Let folks see that you have done so, then," Miss Emmons replied, and added that a young man who could not be trusted with his own bank book could hardly be depended on to make a home.

It is quite likely that Jim brooded over the rebuff; he was surly for a week afterwards. Then, like the weakling that he had become, he stole away for another playday; and again grandmother, with Theodora's and Miss Emmons's connivance, hid the book, this time somewhere in the wagon-house cellar.

Jim did not come home to demand his book, however; in fact, he did not come back at all. Shame perhaps restrained him. When on the third day the old Squire drove down to the village to get him, he found that Jim had gone to Bangor with two disreputable cronies.

A week or two passed, and then came a somewhat curt letter from Jim, asking grandmother to send his bank book to him at Oldtown, Maine. The letter put grandmother in a great state of mind, and she declared indignantly that she would not send it. In truth, we were all certain that now Jim would squander his savings in the worst possible way; but when another letter came, again demanding the book, the old Squire decided that we must send it.

"The poor fellow needs a guardian," he said. "But he hasn't one; he is his own man and has a right to his property."

With hot tears of resentment grandmother, accompanied by Theodora, went to the wagon-house cellar to get the book. After some minutes they returned, exclaiming that they could not find it!

No little stir ensued; what had become of it? For the moment Addison and I actually suspected that grandmother and Theodora had hidden the book again, in order to avoid sending it; but a few words with Theodora, aside, convinced us that the book had really disappeared from the cellar.

The old Squire was greatly disturbed. "Ruth," he said to grandmother, "are you sure you have not put it somewhere else?"

Grandmother declared that she had not. None the less, they searched in all the previous hiding places of the book and continued looking for it until after ten o'clock that night. We were in a very uncomfortable position.

Long after we had gone to bed Addison and I lay awake, talking of it in low tones; we tried to recollect everything that had gone on at home since the book was last seen. I dropped asleep at last, and probably slept for two hours or more, when Addison shook me gently.

"Sh!" he whispered. "Don't speak. Some one is going downstairs."

Listening, I heard a stair creak, as if under a stealthy tread. Addison slipped softly out of bed, and I followed him. Hastily donning some clothes, we went into the hall on tiptoe and descended the stairs. The door from the hall to the sitting-room was open, and also the door to the kitchen. It was not a dark night; and without striking a light we went out through the wood-house to the wagon-house, for we felt sure that some one was astir out there. Just then we heard the outer door of the wagon-house move very slowly and, stealing forward, discovered that it was open about a foot. Still on tiptoe we drew near and were just in time to see a person go out of sight down the lane that led to the road.

"Now who can that be?" Addison whispered. "Looks like a woman, bareheaded."

We followed cautiously, and at the gate caught another glimpse of the mysterious pedestrian some distance down the road. We were quite sure now that it was a woman. We kept her in sight as far as the schoolhouse; there she opened the door—the schoolhouse was rarely locked by night or day—and disappeared inside.

Opposite the schoolhouse was a little copse of chokecherry bushes, and we stepped in among them to watch. Some moments passed. Twice we heard slight sounds inside. Then the dim figure in long clothes came slowly out and returned up the road toward the old Squire's.

"Who was it?" Addison said to me.

"Miss Emmons," I replied.

"Yes," Addison assented reluctantly.

We went into the schoolhouse, struck matches, and at last lighted a pine splint. The drawer to the teacher's desk was locked, but it was a worn old lock, and by inserting the little blade of his knife Addison at last pushed the bolt back.

Inside were the teacher's books and records. A Fifth Reader that we took up opened readily to Jim Doane's bank book.

"She brought that here to hide it!" I exclaimed.

Addison did not reply for a moment. "Perhaps she did," he admitted. "She was walking in her sleep."

"I don't believe it!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, she was," said Addison. "She was walking in her sleep. She must have been."

I was far from convinced, but, seeing that Addison was determined to have it so, I said no more. Taking the book, we returned home. The house was all quiet.

The next morning at the breakfast table Ellen, Theodora and grandmother began to speak of the lost bank book again. I think that Addison had already said something in private to the old Squire, and that they had come to an agreement as to the best course to pursue.

"Don't fret, grandmother!" Addison cried, laughing. "The book's found! We found it late last night, after all the rest were in bed."

There was a general exclamation of surprise. I stole a glance at Miss Emmons. She looked amazed, and I thought that she turned pale; but she was always pale.

"Yes," Addison continued, "'twas great fun. Wilma," he cried familiarly, "did you know that you walk in your sleep?"

Miss Emmons uttered some sort of protest.

"Well, but you do!" Addison exclaimed. "Of course you don't remember it. Somnambulists never do. You walked as if you were walking a chalk line. 'Twas the fuss we made, searching for Jim's book last night, that set you off, I suppose."

Grandmother and the girls burst in with a hundred questions; but the old Squire said in a matter-of-fact tone:

"I used to walk in my sleep myself, when anything had excited me the previous evening. Sometimes, too, when I was a little ill of a cold."

Then the old gentleman went on to relate odd stories of persons who had walked in their sleep and hidden articles, particularly money, and of the efforts that had been made to find the misplaced articles afterwards. In fact, before we rose from the table he had more than half convinced us that Addison's view of the matter—if it were his view—was the right one.

Miss Emmons said very little and did not afterwards speak of the matter, although Addison, to keep up the illusion, sometimes asked her jocosely whether she had rested well, adding:

"I thought I heard you up walking again last night."

The incident was thus charitably passed over. I should not wish to say positively that it was not a case of sleepwalking, but I think every one of us feared that this devoted sister had made herself believe that, since Jim would squander his money in drink, it was right for her to use it for educating her brothers. She probably supposed that she could draw the money herself.

And what became of the hapless bank book? It was sent to Jim as he had demanded; and we may suppose that he drew the money and spent it. At any rate, when he next made his appearance at the old Squire's, two years later, he had neither book nor money.



CHAPTER XIX

GRANDMOTHER RUTH'S LAST LOAD OF HAY

Haying time at the old farm generally began on the Monday after the Fourth of July and lasted from four to six weeks, according to the weather, which is often fitful in Maine. We usually harvested from seventy to seventy-five tons, and in the days of scythes and hand rakes that meant that we had to do a good deal of hard, hot, sweaty work.

Besides Addison, Halstead and me, the old Squire had the two hired men, Jim and Asa Doane, to help him; and sometimes Elder Witham, who was quite as good with a scythe as with a sermon, worked for us a few days.

First we would cut the grass in the upland fields nearest the farm buildings, then the grass in the "Aunt Hannah lot" out beyond the sugar-maple orchard and last the grass in the south field, which, since it was on low, wet ground where there were several long swales, was the slowest to ripen. Often there were jolly times when we cut the south field. Our enjoyment was owing partly to the fact that we were getting toward the end of the hard work, and partly to the bumblebees' nests we found in the swales. Moreover, when we reached that field grandmother Ruth was wont to come out to lay the last load of hay and ride to the barn on it.

In former days when she and the old Squire were young she had helped him a great deal with the haying. Nearly every day she finished her own work early—the cooking, the butter making, the cheese making—and came out to the field to help rake and load the hay. The old Squire has often told me that, except at scythe work, grandmother Ruth was the best helper he had ever had, for at that time she was quick, lithe and strong and understood the work as well as any man. Later when they were in prosperous circumstances she gave up doing so much work out of doors; but still she enjoyed going to the hayfield, and even after we young folks had gone home to live she made it her custom to lay the last load of hay and ride to the barn on it just to show that she could do it still. She was now sixty-four years old, however, and had grown stout, so stout indeed that to us youngsters she looked rather venturesome on a load of hay. On the day of my narrative, we had the last of the grass in the south field "mown and making" on the ground. There were four or five tons of it, all of which we wanted to put into the barn before night, for, though the forenoon was bright and clear, we could hear distant rumblings; and there were other signs that foul weather was coming. The old Squire sent Ellen over to summon Elder Witham to help us; if the rain held off until nightfall, we hoped to have the hay inside the barn.

At noon, while we were having luncheon, grandmother Ruth asked at what time we expected to have the last load ready to go in.

"Not before five o'clock," Asa replied. "It has all to be raked yet."

"Well, I shall be down there by that time," she said in a very matter-of-fact tone. "I'll bring the girls with me."

"Don't you think, Ruth, that perhaps you had better give it up this year?" the old Squire said persuasively.

"But why?" grandmother Ruth exclaimed, not at all pleased.

"Well, you know, Ruth, that neither of us is quite so young as we once were—" the old Squire began apologetically.

"Speak for yourself, Joseph, not for me!" she interrupted. "I'm young enough to lay a load of hay yet!"

"Yes, yes," the old Squire said soothingly, "I know you are, but the loads are rather high, and you know that you are getting quite heavy—"

"Then I can tread down hay all the better!" grandmother Ruth cried, turning visibly pink with vexation.

"All right, all right, Ruth!" the old Squire said with a smile, prudently abandoning the argument.

Then Elder Witham put in his word. "The Lord has appointed to each of us our three-score years and ten, and it behooves us to be mindful that the end of all things is drawing nigh," he remarked soberly.

"Look here, Elder Witham," the old lady exclaimed with growing impatience, "you are here haying to-day, not preaching! I'm going to lay that load of hay if there are men enough here to pitch it on the cart to me."

Jim and Asa snorted; Theodora's efforts to keep a grave face were amusing; and with queer little wrinkles gathering round the corners of his mouth the old Squire, who had finished his luncheon, rose hastily to go out.

We went back to the south field and plied our seven rakes vigorously for an hour and a half. Then Asa went to get the horses and the long rack cart. That day, I remember, Jim laid the loads. Halstead helped him to tread down the hay, and Elder Witham and Asa pitched it on the cart. The old Squire had mounted the driver's seat and taken the reins; and Addison and I raked up the scatterings from the "tumbles."

In the course of two hours four loads of the hay had gone into the barn, and we thought that the thirty-three tumbles that remained could be drawn at the fifth and last load. It was then that grandmother Ruth appeared. She had been watching proceedings from the house and followed the cart down from the barn to the south field, resolutely bent on laying the last load. Theodora and Ellen came with her to help tread down the hay on the cart.

"Here I am!" she cried cheerily. She tossed her hayfork into the empty rack and climbed in after it. Her sun hat was tied under her chin, and she had donned a white waist and a blue denim skirt. "Come on now with your hay!"

Elder Witham moistened his hands, but made no comment. Jim was grinning. The old Squire drove the cart between two tumbles, and the work of pitching on and laying the load began. No one knew better than grandmother Ruth how a load should be laid. She first filled the opposite ends of the rack and kept the middle low; then when the load was high as the rails of the rack she began prudently to lay the hay out on and over them, so as to have room to build a large, wide load.

But in this instance there was a hindrance to good loading that even grandmother's skill could not wholly overcome. Much of the hay for that last load was from the swales at the lower side of the field, where the grass was wild and short and sedgy, a kind that when dry is difficult to pitch with forks and that, since the forkfuls have little cohesion and tend to drop apart, does not lie well on the rails of the rack. Such hay farmers sometimes call "podgum."

Fully aware of the fact, the old Squire now said in an undertone to the elder and to Jim that they had better make two loads of the thirty-three tumbles. But grandmother Ruth overheard the remark and mistook it to mean that the old Squire did not believe she could lay the load. It mortified her.

"No, sir-ee!" she shouted down to the old Squire. "I hear your talk about two loads, and it's because I'm on the cart! I won't have it so! You give me that hay! I'll load it; see if I don't!"

"Bully for you, Gram!" shouted Halstead.

It was no use to try to dissuade her now, as the old Squire well knew from long experience. When her pride was touched no arguments would move her.

With the elder heaving up great forkfuls and grandmother Ruth valiantly laying them at the front and at the back of the rack, they continued loading the hay. Jim tried to place his forkfuls where they need not be moved and where the girls could tread them down.

The load grew higher, for now that we were in the swales the hay could not be laid out widely. It would be a big load, or at least a lofty one. Grandmother Ruth began to fear lest the girls should fall off, and, calling on Elder Witham to catch them, she bade them slide down cautiously to the ground at the rear end of the cart. She then went on laying the load alone. As a consequence it was not so firmly trodden and became higher and higher until Jim and the elder could hardly heave their forkfuls high enough for her to take them. But they got the last tumble up to her and shouted, "All on!" to the old Squire, who now was nearly invisible on his seat in front. Grandmother Ruth settled herself midway on the load to ride it to the barn, thrusting her fork deep into the hay so as to have something to hold on by. We could just see her sun hat and her face over the hay; she looked very pink and triumphant.

Carefully avoiding stones and all the inequalities in the field, the old Squire drove at a slow walk. I surmise that he had his fears. It was certainly the highest load we had hauled to the barn that summer.

The rest of us followed after, glad indeed that the long task of haying was now done, and that the last load would soon be in the barn. Halfway to the farm buildings the cart road led through a gap in the stone wall where two posts with bars separated the south field from the middle field. There was scanty space for the load to pass through, and in his anxiety not to foul either of the posts the old Squire, who could not see well because of the overhanging hay, drove a few inches too close to one of them, and a wheel passed over a small stone beside the wheel track. The jolt was slight, but it proved sufficient to loosen the unstable "podgum." The load had barely cleared the posts when the entire side of it came sliding down—and grandmother Ruth with it! We heard her cry out as she fell, and then all of us who were behind scaled the wall and rushed to her rescue. The old Squire stopped the horses, jumped from his seat over the off horse's back and was ahead of us all, crying, "Ruth, Ruth!"

There was a huge heap of loose hay on the ground, fully ten feet high, but she was nowhere to be seen in it. Nor did she speak or stir.

"Great Lord, I'm afraid it's killed her!" Elder Witham exclaimed. Jim and Asa stood horrified, and the girls burst out crying.

The old Squire had turned white. "Ruth! Ruth!" he cried. "Are you badly hurt? Do you hear? Can't you answer?" Not a sound came from the hay, not a movement; and, falling on his knees, he began digging it away with his hands. None of us dared use our hay-forks, and now, following his example, we began tearing away armfuls of hay. A moment later, Addison, who was burrowing nearly out of sight, got hold of one of her hands. It frightened him, and he cried out; but he pulled at it. Instantly there was a laugh from somewhere underneath, then a scramble that continued until at last grandmother Ruth emerged without aid of any sort and stood up, a good deal rumpled and covered with hay but laughing.

"It didn't hurt me a mite!" she protested. "I came down light as a feather!"

"But why didn't you answer when we called to you?" the elder exclaimed reprovingly. "You kept so still we were scared half to death about you!"

"Oh, I just wanted to see what you would all do," she replied airily and still laughing. "I was a little afraid you would stick your forks into the hay, but I was watching for that."

The old Squire was so relieved, so overjoyed, to see her on her feet unhurt that he had not a word of reproach for her. All he said was, "Ruth Ann, I'm afraid you are growing too young for your age!"

The truth is that grandmother Ruth was dreadfully chagrined that the load she had laid had not held together as far as the barn; and it was partly mortification, I think, that led her to lie so still under the hay.

She wanted to remount the cart and have the hay pitched up to her; but as it was getting late in the afternoon, and as there was no ladder at hand, Jim and Asa hoisted Addison up, and he succeeded in rebuilding the load so that we were able to take it into the barn without further incident.

We could hardly believe that the fall had not injured grandmother Ruth, and as a matter of fact Theodora afterwards told us that she had several large black-and-blue spots as a result of her adventure. The old lady herself, however, scouted the idea that she had been in the least injured and did not like to have us show any solicitude about her.

The following year, as haying drew to a close, we young folks waited curiously to see whether she would speak of going out to lay the last load. Not a word came from her; but I think it was less because she felt unable to go than it was that she feared we would refer to her mishap of the previous summer.



CHAPTER XX

WHEN UNCLE HANNIBAL SPOKE AT THE CHAPEL

For a month or more the old Squire had looked perplexed. Two of his lifelong friends were rival candidates for the senatorship from Maine, and each had expressed the hope that the old Squire would aid him in his canvass. Both candidates knew that many of the old Squire's friends and neighbors looked to him for guidance in political matters. Without seeming to express personal preference, the old Squire could not choose between them, for both were statesmen of wide experience and in every way good men for the office.

The first was Hannibal Hamlin, who had been Vice-President with Abraham Lincoln in 1861-1865: "Uncle Hannibal," as we young people at the farm always called him after that memorable visit of his, when we ate "fried pies" together. He had been Senator before the Civil War, and also Governor of Maine; now, after the war, in 1868, he had again been nominated for the senatorship under the auspices of the Republican party.

The other candidate, the Hon. Lot M. Morrill, had been Governor of Maine in 1858, and had also been United States Senator. I cherished a warm feeling for him, for he was the man who had so opportunely helped me to capture the runaway calf, Little Dagon.

Politically, we young folks were much divided in our sympathies that fall. My cousins Addison and Theodora were ardent supporters of Uncle Hannibal, whereas I, thinking of that calf, could not help feeling loyal to Senator Morrill. Hot debates we had! Halstead alone was indifferent. At last Ellen declared herself on my side and thus made a tie at table. I never knew whom the old Squire favored; he never told us and was always reluctant to speak of the matter.

It was a very close contest, and in the legislature was finally decided by a plurality of one in favor of Mr. Hamlin. Seventy-five votes were cast for him, seventy-four for Mr. Morrill, and there was one blank vote, over which a dispute later arose.

Earlier in the season, when the legislators who were to decide the matter at Augusta were being elected, both candidates made personal efforts to win popular support. Thus it happened that Uncle Hannibal on one of his visits to his native town that year, promised to give us a little talk. Since there was no public hall in the neighborhood, the gathering was to be held at the capacious old Methodist chapel.

There had been no regular preaching there of late, and the house had fallen into lamentable disrepair. The roof was getting leaky; the wind had blown off several of the clapboards; and a large patch of the plaster, directly over the pulpit, had fallen from the ceiling.