Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/184

178 you of that bitter mistake my father made and the quarrel with his brother, for he spoke of it often himself and said that, in all his life, he never learned a more valuable lesson. Felix did not marry, since his zeal for the orchard and the bees and later for farming on a larger and larger scale seemed to occupy his every thought. It was he who reclaimed the marshy, waste ground in the valley, 'for,' he said, 'it is wrong that we on the seaboard leave our home acres and move farther and farther westward, looking for new land that is easy to till. It is a wasteful policy, even for a new country.' That was one of the things he had learned on his long journey across the West and back again."

"But I do not understand about Anthony Crawford," put in Oliver. "I haven't seen yet where he comes in at all."

"He calls us cousin, but it is a distant kinship, since he is grandson of that Martin Hallowell who broke with his partner Reuben over the matter of the Huntress. He used to come often to stay in Medford Valley, for he had been left without parents and Felix Brighton was his guardian. My Aunt Barbara, Jasper's mother, had lost her husband early, and she went to live with her brother Felix in the yellow stone farmhouse that had come to him from some earlier Hallowell who had built it a hundred years ago. How we loved the place and how happy we all were there, for I spent almost as much time under that wide, friendly roof as did Anthony.