Page:David Alden's Daughter.djvu/22

2 hail with so much pleasure in our country drives this very summer.

"So this is Roxbury, is it? " said Samuel Cheeseboro, staring about him; "whoa, Lightfoot! Let be, Rover, let 'em graze a bit if they can find a bite. 'T is the last grass they're like to see, poor beasts. Roxbury, eh?"

And Samuel pulled off his clumsy wool hat, took a bandanna handkerchief from the pocket of his riding coat, and proceeded to rub his head, face, and neck very much as a warm and dusty man does, after two hundred years of progress.

A comely and personable young bachelor was Samuel Cheeseboro, and so thought and declared not only most of the maids and widows of Stonington, Connecticut, where he lived, but nearly every woman encountered upon the long journey he was now completing from that place to Boston, measuring the distance by the footpace of his carefully driven cattle. Of course, he had been many nights upon the road, and at his last stopping place came near falling a victim to the determined overtures of a buxom widow, who plainly declared that the drover's cattle and her pasture suited each other so marvelously that it was a sin to divide them, and that she would give her eyes if her farm had so shrewd a master as Cheeseboro would be sure to prove.

"At any rate, you'11 be coming back this way when you've made your market on the beasts, and you'll tarry a day or two and rest, and look over