The old lady’s gossip of the days gone by adds to the very sparkle of her beer; yet her whole life for more than half a century seems centered upon her one adventure, the coming and going of her children passing as too prosaic to mention. Not so that one great fright and its results. The now almost forgotten Camden and Amboy Railroad was then in operation; but though scarcely more than a mile distant, it was as nothing to her. She knew neither what nor where it was. But where the best whortleberries grew in the back swamp, that was knowledge worth possessing. Although her cousin Abijah had killed a bear during the winter, she did not think of it then, and started for berries where few men would care to follow. She knew every crooked path in the sprout-lands, and could find her way through them in the dark, she boasted. And so, with a light heart, she gathered berries. But at last an ominous screeching fell upon her ears. She stopped her work to listen. Louder and more angry, ay, and nearer, too, was that portentous scream. “Could it be another bear?” she thought, and at once turned her face homeward. The big basket was not quite full, and there were such loads of fruit within easy reach! It was tantalizing; but all doubt vanished with the second, shriller, more unearthly scream. The path was no longer plain, nor she sure-footed. Pitching recklessly forward, the berries were bounced by handfuls from the basket, and it finally, as a dragging weight, was thrown aside. And, still sounding through the swamp, the terrible screeching of that angry bear! The cottage at last was seen through the thick-set trees, but not so plainly the tortuous path. The frightened woman was moved by but one thought—to reach her home; and, escaping until now all other dangers, she took one misstep, almost at her journey’s end, and sank waist-deep in yielding mud. There was strength left for but one despairing cry, which fortunately fell not upon deaf ears. In a moment her husband came to her rescue. Such was her story, but by no means as she told it—a quaint narrative that invariably concluded with the pathetic remark, “And to think I lost all them beautiful berries!” The old lady had heard the first screech of a locomotive that awoke the echoes in the Nottingham swamps. All the while her patient husband sits by the fire, giving vent to his feelings by a vicious poke at the smouldering back-log. For fifty years he has been her audience, and the story is now a trifle monotonous—so much so that, no sooner has she finished, at least when I was present, than he remarks, “If you tell the lad that story any more, I’ll a-wished you’d stayed stuck in the swamp.” And then we have another cup of beer, and, followed by the old man, I start for home.