Grandfather did this as a sort of penance for a great mistake he had made, and I think it was with the idea of making an atonement by confession that he used always to tell me the story of his relations with the old man. At any rate, he started his narrative when we left the house and began to walk out to the cemetery, and ended it as he laid the flowers on the neglected grave. I trotted along beside him, faster and faster as he grew more and more interested, and then stood breathless on the other side of the grave as he finished, in his cracked old voice, harsh with emotion. The first part of his story happened a very long time ago, even before grandfather was born, when Jedediah Chillingworth first began to win for himself the combination title of town-fool and town-liar. By the time grandfather was a half-grown boy, big enough to join in the rough crowd of village lads who tormented Jed, the old dizzard had been for years the local butt. Of course I never saw him, but I have keard so much about him from all the gossips in the village, and grandfather used to describe him so vividly, that I feel as if I know all about him. For about ten years of his youth Jedediah had been way from our little Vermont town, wandering in the great world. From his stories, he had been everywhere on he map. In the evening, around the stove in the village post-office, when somebody read aloud from the newspaper a remarkable event, all the loafers turned to Jed with wide, malicious grins, to hear him cap it with a yet ore marvelous tale of what had happened to him. They gathered around the simple-minded little old man, their tongues in their cheeks, and drew from him one silly, impossible, boastful story after another. They made him amplify circumstantially by clumsily artful questions, and poked one another in the ribs with delight over his deluded joy in their sympathetic interest. As he grew older, his yarns solidified like folk-lore, into a consecrated and legendary form, which he repeated endlessly without variation. There were many of them--"How I drove a team of four horses over a falling bridge," "How I interviewed the King of Portugal," "How I saved big Sam Harden's life in the forest fire." But the favorite one was, "How I rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts." This was the particular flaunting, sumptuous yarn which everybody made old Jed bring out for company. If a stranger remarked, "Old man Chillingworth can tell a tale or two, can't he?" everybody started up eagerly with the cry: "Oh, but have you heard him tell the story of how he rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts?"