Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/182

176 assured them that she had dined and had not got wet, that, except for Mrs. Brown's terrible fever of anxiety lest Cousin Jasper should not be properly cared for, all had gone well. Might she listen, please, and was there going to be another story?

"Not of just the same kind that I have been telling you up yonder on the Windy Hill," replied Tom Brighton, "although here you see the source of all those tales and of a hundred others like them. They are all buried here in these dusty papers, the history of your forbears and of the lands in Medford Valley. It goes all the way back, does the record, to the time when our several times great-grandfather bought the first tract from the Indian, Nashola. I am always glad to think that the red man had enough intelligence and the white man enough honor to make something like a real bargain, that this valley was purchased for what the wild lands were worth instead of being paid for with a gun, a drink of bad spirits, and a handful of beads. See, here is Nashola's name; he learned to write after a fashion, although the Indian witnesses signed only with a mark. And here is the signature of that first one of our kin to settle in the New World, Matthew Hallowell."

"Hallowell?" echoed Oliver. "Did he belong to those same Hallowells in the story, who quarreled over the Huntress?"

"Yes," was the answer, "he was the beginning of a vigorous line, living in and near Medford