What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude and decay about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; half the cellar door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; the chimney was ragged and broken at the top; the clap-boards had never been painted, and now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot. It positively appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, over against the little cooper-shop adjoining it—but perhaps that was a trick of the waning evening light. I said to myself that if we were not prospering on the Beech farm, at least our foe “Jee” Hagadorn did not seem to be doing much better himself. In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of our community, though this by no means involves what people in cities think of as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and then he had his coopering business; with the two he ought to have got on comfortably enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed to be continually interfering with this. This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of his life before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of his career. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a city in the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lot of men under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was in these days, I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which the younger Benaiah missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it was wrong to make barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He moved into our neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrews place, and build a little shop. It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourished if he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thing he did was to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxing them with sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer. For a long time they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, he made an unpleasant impression at church. As has been said, our meeting-house was a union affair; that is to say, no one denomination being numerous enough to have an edifice of its own, all the farmers roundabout—Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on—joined in paying the expenses. The travelling preachers who came to us represented these great sects, with lots of minute shadings off into Hard-shell, Soft-shell, Freewill, and other subdivided mysteries which I never understood. Hagadorn had a denomination all to himself, as might have been expected from the man. What the name of it was I seem never to have heard; perhaps it had no name at all. People used to say, though, that he behaved like a Shouting Methodist.