n point a still
rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height
to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a
meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed
all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view
of Lion's Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they
came on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the
Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the
coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that
dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about
the door-yard to look at the Lion's Head, to wonder at it and mock at
it, according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have
felt that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who
sold them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if
they were very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to
make much of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were
not rather lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts
scream at night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem
lonesome. When one of them declared that if she should hear a catamount
scream or a bear growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she
presumed we must all die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a
covert slant in her words, for they were spoken with the same look she
wore when she told them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the
black maple sugar three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned
upon their urgence that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the
corners of the house was her husband, and the three lank boys with him
were her sons; that the children whose faces watched them through the
writhing window panes were her two little girls; that the urchin who
stood shyly twisted, all but his white head and sunburned face, into her
dress and glanced at them with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and
that he was three years old. With like coldness of voice and face, she
assented to their conjecture that the space walled off in the farther
corner of the orchard was the family burial ground; and she said, with
no more feeling that the ladies could see than she had shown concerning
the other facts, that the graves they saw were those of her husband's
family and of the children she had lost