al woman in chaste and single heart, in motherly loves, in the
tenderest sympathies and most unselfish feelings, she was a large,
square-shouldered and hard-handed woman; she could split oven-wood,
hunt bees, skin deer, and hoe corn; and she loved to tell "how she shot
a tory in the Revolution, who came while Moses was away in the wars,
and fired their barn, and took her best feather-bed out door and ripped
it, and scattered the feathers to the sky: how the tory whooped and
keeled as she dropped him, and how three other tories and an Indian
legged it like Jehu away."

Uncle Walter Mowry was younger by ten years than Mr. Waldron, and his
wife Huldah was five years younger than he, and they were specimens of
thrifty and noble, but uncultivated nature, such as we love to find in
the backwoods, and such as furnish materials for the richest and finest
city life. Uncle Walter was of a medium stature, a well-moulded face,
and fair skin, and he was hardy as a bear and athletic as a panther.
There was never a farmer who kept cleaner fields, or handsomer
stake-and-rider fence than he; or had earlier corn, or a larger
woodpile; yet he did love a hunt more dearly than a venison pie; he
caught fish from pools where others received not a nibble; and he
enjoyed a leisure day, and a feast, and a fine story.

Aunt Huldah was a little swarthy woman, weighing only ninety pounds at
forty years of age; but she was free and generous, and all who had her
heart and its overflowing love, had all, and there was nothing left of
her. She had the whitest linens, the clearest maple sugar, and the
smoothest and cleanest white maple floor in all the settlement; and she
loved scrubbing and scouring as well as Uncle Walter loved hunting. A
stranger would have thought her a real firer of a scold; but she was
never in a passion; and Uncle Walter used to say, he found her the
best, if anything, when seeming to scold the hardest, and she had that
way of expressing her interest in him, and making her work go on more
briskly.

There were Thomas Teezle and his wife, who were valued acquisitions to
the settlement. Thomas was stocky and muscular, frank, fearless and
free-hearted; and he kept a keen and ringing broad axe, and could hew a
beam or a sleeper as straight as a bee-line.

There were Jacob Flaxman and his wife Phoebe, and they were cousins;
and both had yellow hair and freckled faces; both weighed in one notch;
both sang in one song; both craved