Page:Rural Studies - Mitchell - 1867.djvu/19

 An old-style farm

Some twenty odd years ago—more or less—I chanced to be the owner of a wild, unkempt, slatternly farm, of three or four hundred acres in extent, amid the rocky fastnesses of eastern Connecticut. The township in which it lay was a scattered wilderness of a settlement, lying along the Hartford and New London turnpike. There was a toll-gate (I remember that), and I have a fancy that the toll-gatherer was a sallow-faced shoemaker with club-feet, who sometimes made his appearance with a waxed-end in his mouth, and a flat-headed hammer in his hand. He hardly wields the hammer any more; and his last waxed-end must long ago have been drawn tight, and clipped away.

There was a wild common over which the November winds swept with a pestilent force, with nothing to break them, except a pair of twin churches. One

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