Deacon Hall understood the art of making a chowder as well as that of curing dunfish, or if his fishing party preferred a muddle, that is, a chowder with no potatoes and less liquor, he was equally skilful. Real lovers of fish and seafaring men I have generally found liked the muddle, as perhaps the following incident will attest. Capt. Ignatius Pierce, a man of dry humor, spent a number of years in California, never intimating in his letters any intention of an immediate return home. His wife, about nine o’clock one morning, received a telegram from him in Boston, merely saying, “have a muddle for dinner.” The good Deacon would have been amused at the following description of the ingredients of a genuine New England chowder by a professor of modern languages in the University of Virginia, in a work published by him in 1872, “A many sided dish of pork and fish, potatoes and bread, onions and turnips all mixed up with fresh chequits and seabass, black fish and long clams, pumpkinseed, and an accidental eel, well peppered and salted, piled up in layers, and stewed together.” If such a dish as that had been placed before the Deacon he would in a changed form have followed the directions for cooking a coot—to wit, shoot your coot, pick it, parboil it, stuff it, roast it, baste it, and then throw it away. CHAPTER III. During my early life a house stood in North street between the house of Mrs. Ruth H. Baker and the present Plymouth Rock House, concerning the occupants of which I must say a word. It was a double house, the westerly end of which was occupied by Ebenezer Drew, his wife Deborah, or Aunt Debby, as she was called, and his brother Malachi. Ebenezer had no children and Malachi was a bachelor. They were the salt of the earth and the salt had not lost its savor. Without the three it would have been difficult for some of the neighbors, including my mother, to keep house. Malachi repaired the leaks in the roof, eased the doors, mended the chairs and kept the house generally in running order. Uncle Eben did the chores, fed and scratched the pig, sawed, split and piled the wood and wheeled our corn to the mill, taking care that Sylvanus Maxim, the miller, did not take out too much toll. In those days, every family bought or raised its own corn and sent it to the mill to be ground. When the steamboat arrived, if one happened to be running, Eben was always on the wharf with his handcart ready to take the luggage of passengers to their homes. I can see the old man now scraping with his jackknife the apples I occasionally gave him, which, with his loss of teeth, he could neither bite nor chew. He died January 6, 1851, at the age of 77 years.