Then they talked old times over, and rehearsed a few personal histories, while the yellow corn glistened in rising hills before them. Mr. Waldron related scenes he witnessed at Bennington and Saratoga, and told of the Captain's commission and forty dollars in silver, he received for taking six Hessians at the battle of Trenton. Troffater wanted to tell what his father did in the Revolution, but he had not courage to speak; and perhaps if he had, some one would have hinted the current tradition, that his father was a cowboy, and stole cattle from the Americans, and drove and sold them to the British, and then stole them from the British and drove them back again. The conversation soon turned on the settlement, and the history of the oldest inhabitants. "I tell ye what, they were rather tough times after all," said Uncle Walter. "I remember when I cut the first tree on my farm, and stuck the first stake for my shanty. I had come a good ways from home, and it was going on night, and the wolves howled in hearing, and I begun to feel dubious. Uncle Waldron heard me chopping, and come, and took me home to his little hemlock hut. Remember it, Uncle Mose? I slep on the softest corner of your black muck-floor, and you said I snored like an alligator." "The Stringers kept bachelors-hall, they say, over on the Owasco Flats, and baked nine crusts to one jonny cake," added Colwell. "O, my stars!" cried Nancy Nimblet, "that must have been long before we came here; and, pray tell, Mr. Colwell, how they managed their dough." "Why, they wet their pounded corn in water (there was no mill in these parts then), tossed up a hunker of a loaf, laid it down on a flat stone by the fire, and baked a crust, then peeled it off and eat it, while another was bakin', and so on to the ninth crust of the same smokin' cake." "And it was thought a scrumtious kind of a thing to visit the gals in our buff-leather breeches in them days," said Colwell. "O, the _buff_ breeches came long after that," said Fabens. "We had grown quite civilized and fashionable when we wore the yellow buffs. Besides, in those times there were not many girls in the country to visit. But if the times were tough, they gave us a great deal of comfort. I came here with my axe on my shoulder; I cut the first tree on my farm, too, and paid for my farm, chopping for others. I made my first bedstead. There was an auger in the settlement--it was yours, Uncle Walter, and I borrowed that and framed me a bedstead of maple saplings, and laced in elm-bark in lieu of a cord, and it gave me many pleasant sleeps.