"Sometimes this same brother would get permission to take me on a longer excursion, to visit the old homestead at the "Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a healthy child of five years, and that road in the old time, led through a rural Paradise beautiful at every season,--whether it was the time of song sparrows and violets, or wild roses, or coral-hung barberry bushes, or of fallen leaves and snow drifts. We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the cat birds sing, and at Mingo Beach to revel in the sudden surprise of the open sea and to listen to the chant of the waves always stronger and grander there than any where along the shore. We passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest wood path to us, in all the world, the path to the ancestral farm-house." "Farther down the road where the cousins were all grown up men and women, Aunt Betsey's cordial old-fashioned hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two. We watched the milking, fed the chickens and fared gloriously. Aunt Betsey could not have done more to entertain us had we been the President's children." "We took in a home-feeling with the words 'Aunt Betsey' then and always. She had just the husband that belonged to her in my Uncle David, an upright man, frank-faced, large of heart and spiritually-minded. He was my father's favorite brother, and to our branch of the family, 'the Farms' meant Uncle David and Aunt Betsey." The Farms was of greater relative importance in those days. The farms were fairly fertile and were carefully tilled. Their owners, former sea captains, were well-to-do, there were two good schools and the Third Social Library was founded in 1806. The first catalogue, written in 1811, is still preserved, there are some books marked "Read at Sea," among them "The Saint's Everlasting Rest," "Edwards on Affliction" and the first volume of Josephus, cheerful reading for the young captains. Toward the middle of the century summer fishing took the place of merchant voyages, so the sea-men turned to shoe making in the winter. Almost every house had its little 10 x 10 shoe shop, in which was room for one man on a low stool, a chair for a visitor, an iron stove, a bench with tools, the oval lap-stone to peg shoes on, with rolls and scraps of leather, withal a pungent smell. In the house on Mingo Beach Hill our Mary Larcom Ober was born in 1835 and here her father died in the same year. There was an older sister Abigail, who died when she was a young woman.