Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned FarmPaine, Albert Bigelow
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Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned Farm
Paine, Albert Bigelow
Abandoned farms -- Fiction; Farm life -- Fiction
That settled it; Westbury was acknowledged authority. Sam rolled out two
vinegar-barrels, both pronounced good. Following there came what seemed
at least a hundred apple-barrels, potato-barrels, turnip-barrels,
ash-barrels, boxes, benches, sections of shelving, and a general heap of
debris, some of it unrecognizable even by 'Lias Mullins, oldest member
of the board.
"It was a Meeker habit to throw nothing away," commented Westbury, as he
looked over the assortment. "No matter what it was, they thought they
might want it, some day. You'll find the same thing when you get to the
attic."
At this moment Sam discovered in a dark corner a heap of flat slabs
that, brought to light, proved to be small tombstones. Westbury grinned.
"Those were put over the cemetery fence," he said, "whenever the
relatives bought bigger ones. Uncle Joe brought a lot of them home to
cool his milk on."
I looked at them doubtfully. They were nothing but stones, and they had
served their original purpose. Still, it had been a rather particular
purpose and they were carved with certain names and dates. I was not
sure that their owners might not sometime--some weird fall evening,
say--take a notion to claim them.
They opened the door of history to Westbury. He began to recall
connections and events, and related how a certain Hezekiah Lee, whose
name was on one of them, had decided, some fifty years before, to give
up farming and go to counterfeiting. His career from that moment had
been a busy one; he had been always traveling one way or the other
between affluence and the penitentiary. His last term had been a long
one, and when he got out, styles in national currency had changed a good
deal and Uncle Hezekiah couldn't seem to get the hang of the new
designs. So he took to preaching, and held camp-meetings. He lived to
be eighty-seven, and people had traveled forty miles to his funeral.
I said I would keep Uncle Hezekiah's headstone. In the end we made an
inside walk of the collection, for the old cellar had a dirt floor and
was not always dry, but we laid them face down. When we had raked and
swept, and brushed and put back the articles accepted by the board, and
all was trim and neat, Westbury looked in.
"Looks nice," he said, and added, "that's what you've got now, but by
and by you'll have your mess of old truck, too, and the next man will
cart a lot of it to the wood-pile, just as you're carting it now."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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