Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/36

 of the room was a pile of abandoned rubbish,—fragments of an old loom, and many broken and disabled farming implements. Tom, delving among these relics, suddenly shouted: “Hello! I’ve found the ‘Entailed Hat.’ It wasn’t buried with that old duffer, after all.” He certainly had unearthed the most antiquated specimen of headgear ever seen outside the walls of a museum,—a faded brown beaver, with wide brim and high bell-shaped crown, which he was jamming in here and bulging out there, with a view of restoring its original shape. “It’s been a dandy in its day,” he commented, as he smoothed its frowsy surface, “and it’s not a bad tile yet. I don’t know but I might wear it myself on Sundays, walking about in the holy calm, looking over my possessions. How do I look, Bert?” he asked, having donned it and pulled it well down over his ears.

“Well, if I must answer, I should say you look a composite of Guy Fawkes, Puritan father, and Buffalo Bill, with perhaps just a dash of Oregon farmer,” replied the reverend joker.

While this by-play was going on, I had been trying to burnish the old mirror’s cloudy surface, finding the bluish haze was there to stay. I thought of the antique mirror of which Hawthorne tells us, that hung in the old Province House,—the one old Esther Dudley so often stood before, leaning upon her gold-headed staff, seeing pass across its blurred surface in