Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 6.djvu/133

 THE STORY OF A DESERTED FARM-HOUSE.

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��done I thought I would drop around and learn who had come. Is there any thing you want, gentlemen, to make yourselves comfortable?"

" Not to-night, thank you," replied John. '" We shall, however, be glad of some produce in the morning."

" It is all right, strangers. You can have any thing in reason that I have for the asking."

The good man said " good night " and turned to leave us, when I pro- pounded a question that caused him to pause.

"Who owns this place?" was the question.

"Who? It belongs to my wife."

" May we be allowed to occupy it for the night ? " asked John.

" Certainly, gentlemen, certainly. But you can have a good bed and other comforts at the house if you will accept them."

We declined with thanks, offering as an excuse that we were camping out and preferred " roughing it."

" This house and farm appears to be deserted," I said with a determina- tion to draw him out in conversation on the subject which had been forced upon my mind a short time before.

"Yes," he replied, "but that is a long story and would not in the least degree interest you."

It required but little urging to con- vince our visitor — perhaps it would be more polite under the circumstances to say our host or our landlord — that the story of the place would be of absorbing interest to us.

" Do you think so? "

I replied that I was in earnest, and John added an appeal which carried assurance of our good faith, and caused him to decide that he would gratify our curiosity, although he stated that " it was a story of sorrow and ought not to be repeated except in a proper spirit."

Declining a proffered cigar, and apologizing because of a preference for chewing, he seated himself upon the limb of a fallen tree that overhung the beach, and the following is " the

��story of the deserted farm-house," which the farmer told with his gaze evidently fixed far out in the silvery trail of the moon, in measured sen- tences, and with a depth of pathos which made a lasting impression upon the minds of his hearers : —

" Stephen Waldron — some called him Steve and others old Steve — was about the first settler in these parts. Where he came from I never knew, and who his relations were, if he had any, I never heard him say. My opinion is that he was of Scotch de- scent, although I sometimes inclined to think — mostly because of reticence — that there was Irish in his blood, and that he was brought up in the Catholic church. This is all specula- tion however. Well, the land, as I discovered after his death, was squatted on. He had no title to it. In those days there were no roads to the back country, and consequently lumber, provision and other farm necessities had to be boated. That is how, you see, he came to build in this out-of- the-way place. I 've no dates to go by, but I reckon it was at about the close of the war of the Revolution, for the old man was in that war, and had a pension from the government from the time I first knew him till he died."

" Well, ' old Steve ' was no common kind of a man. He was no body's fool, and no body tried to fool him. He had as many good qualities as people in general, and he had some of the failings of his day and genera- tion. He had, gentlemen, I am sorry to say, a fondness for intoxicating liquor, and was pretty likely to get tipsy when he went to the county seat on the glorious fourth and on state occasions. But he never abused any body, and Polly, his wife, never found any fault about it or flung it in his face. No she always said, Stephen was one man in a thousand ; was good, and wil- ling to carry his end of the load, and was a darned sight better than some men who made a greater show of re- spectability. He was a soldier under

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