Eli Brayton grew to be quite a character himself. When they came around to him to collect money for the church he'd contribute some of his unpaid shoe accounts. He knew the people that owed them would pay the church, because they'd be afraid not to. Old Deacon Timothy Todd used to do the collecting. He had a high-keyed voice and no front teeth, and always chewed as he talked. He'd pull out the bill and shake it at the man that owed it and say: 'A debt to the church is registered above. Not to pay it is a mortal sin. To perish in sin is to be burned with brimstone and eaten by the worm that dieth not.' Before Deacon Todd got through that sinner was ready to come across." Westbury in childhood had seen Deacon Timothy Todd and could imitate his speech and manner. He enjoyed doing it as much as we enjoyed hearing him. "Deacon Todd had two boys," he went on, "Jim and Tim, and he used to say, 'My Jim is a good boy, but Tim proved himself a bad one when he slapped his mother with an eel-skin.' Deacon Todd married a second time. He lent some money to a woman to set up a business in Westport, and a little while after his wife died he went down to collect it. Somebody met him on the road and asked him where he was going. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm just going down to Westport to collect a little money I loaned a young woman, and I'll bring back the money or the young woman, one of the two,' and he did. He was back with her next day. Timothy Todd was a great old chap. When the Civil War broke out he didn't want to go. He was getting along pretty well, then--forty or so--and had already lost two of his front teeth and claimed he couldn't bite off the ca'tridges. They used to have to bite off the paper ends of them for muzzle-loading guns. Then the draft came and he was scared up for fear they'd get him. They didn't, though, but they got about all the others that were left, and Deacon Todd went down to see them off. When the train came and he saw them all get on, and the train starting, he forgot all about not wanting to go, and jumped on with them, and went. 'I saw all my friends was goin',' he said, 'an' th'd be nobody left in the country but me. "I reckon I can bite them ca'tridges off with my eye-teeth, if I really want to do it," I says, an' I was on the train an' half-way to Danbury before I recollected that Mrs. Todd had told me to bring home a dime's wuth o' coffee an' a pound o' sugar. I didn't get back with 'em fer two years, an' then I come in limpin' with a bullet in my left hind leg. "Here's that pound o' coffee and dime's wuth o' sugar," I says. "I waited fer 'em to git cheaper."'" Westbury's visits did much to brighten up the somber days, while our blazing hearth and the sturdy little furnace down-stairs kept us warm and cozy. Looking out on a landscape that was like a Christmas card, and remembering the drabble and jangle of the town, we were not sorry to be among the clean white hills. III _No animal except man digs and plants_