My uncles on my mother's side were great hunters. Foxes and minks and woodchucks were plentiful in those days and a good many of them fell into my uncles' traps. I remember remonstrating with my uncle "Ed Larcom," about traps, telling him it was cruel, and that I didn't see how a good kind man like him could earn his living that way. "Oh," he said, "They were made for me!" Doesn't the Bible say "And he shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over all the cattle, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth?" My uncles all said there was no better eating than a good fat woodchuck; that the chucks fed on grain and roots and clean things. The manner of cooking was to parboil them, stuff with herbs and bake. Some years ago, I was invited to join the Daughters of the Revolution, and to this end to look up my ancestry. To my surprise I could not find a single forbear of mine who was connected in any way with wars or rumors of wars, and I reported that I hadn't been able to find any of my kin who ever wanted to kill anything but a woodchuck. Since this writing, my cousin, Dr. Abbott, still living, at the age of ninety-five in Illinois, has informed me that my remote ancestor, Benjamin Ober, did valiant work on the sea in the Revolution. Elsie Doane seems to think that these scraps of antiquity would not be quite satisfactory without mention of "Jim" Perry's grocery store, though she never bought a pound of coffee in it, and, if she says she did, she thinks she is her mother. It was our only store and so was quite a feature. It was presided over by Mr. James Perry, a tall dignified man, whom his wife in her various offices as helpmate, always called "Mr. Perry." Mr. Perry was color blind and whenever my mother sent me for blue silk or blue yarn, he always selected green or purple. You may wonder how blue silk comes to be a grocery product, but this was really a _department_ store. When we had a half cent coming to us, Mrs. Perry always produced a _needle_, for the exact change. You see how honest we were! This honest department store stood, in fact it _was_ Pump Cottage, for I think Pump Cottage is the same old jackknife with different blades and handles. Farther up, on the Wenham Road, lived Deacon Joseph Williams, a beautiful old gentleman, with a disposition as sunny as a ripe peach. His house was small and his family large. All the Williamses in this region would look back to that little house as their old family homestead, and I was sorry when Mr. Doane decided that it could not be remodelled, but had to be taken down.