suspended
like the drab curtain of a theatre between the solemn chimney towers;
the northern chimney broad and huge, and bottomed on an arch; the
southern chimney leaner, but erect as a perpetual sentry on the King's
road.

The house where Levin Dennis now looked out was a three-roomed, frame,
double cabin, with beds in every room but the kitchen, and the hip-roof
gave considerable bed accommodation in the attic besides, the rooms
being all small, as was general in that day. Around the house extended a
pretty garden, with some cherry and plum trees and wild peach along its
boundaries, and the fields around contained many stumps, showing that
the clearing had been made not many years before, while here and there
some heaps of brush had been allowed to accumulate instead of being
burned.

As Levin looked at one of those brush-heaps in a low place, a pair of
buzzards slowly and clumsily circled up from it, and, flying low, went
round and round as if they might be rearing their young there and hated
to go far; and, for long afterwards, Levin saw them hovering high above
the spot in parental mindfulness.

He drew his head in the dormer casement, and was making ready to go down
to the breakfast he smelled cooking below, when his own name was
pronounced in the garden, and he stopped and listened.

"You lie!" exclaimed the old woman's voice. "I'll mash you to the
ground!"

"He said so, grandma, indeed he did."

Levin had a peep from the depths of the garret, and he saw that Mrs.
Cannon was standing with the hoe she had been using raised over Hulda's
head, while a demoniac expression of rage distorted her not unpleasing
features.

Levin walked at once to the window and whistled, as if to the bird in
the tree. The older woman immediately dropped her hoe, and cried out to
Levin:

"Heigh, son! ain't you most a-starved fur yer breakfast? It's all ready
fur ye, an' Huldy's waitin' fur ye to come down."

Levin at once went down the short, winding stairs to a table spread in
the kitchen end, and the old woman blew a tin horn towards Johnson's
Cross-roads, as if summoning other boarders, and then she said to Levin,
with a very pleasing countenance:

"Son, these yer no-count people will be askin' you questions to bother
you, and I don't want no harm to come to you, Levin; so you tell
everybody you see yer that Levin Cannon is your name, and they'll think
you's juss one o' my people, and won't ask you no more."

Hulda sli