lossoming fields
of the old Dalton Settlement look, in early June, the loveliest, most
ethereal, in New England. There, a million million feathery daisies
sway and dance in the breeze, lifting their snowy wheels to the blue
June sky. There they grow and thrive, the slender green stalks tossing
their pearly disks among sister groves of buttercups till the eye is
fairly dazzled with the symphony of white and gold. The back-aching
farmers of the original Dalton Settlement had indeed tried to root out
the lovely pests, but little did our Caleb care! If he had ever trod
his ancestral acres either for pleasure or profit he might in time
have "stomped out" the whiteweed, so the neighbors said, for he had
the family foot, the size of an anvil; but he much preferred a
sedentary life, and the whiteweed went on seeding itself from year to
year.

Caleb was tall, loose-jointed, and black as a thunder-cloud--the
swarthy skin, like the big foot, having been bequeathed to him by the
original Caleb, whose long-legged, shaggy-haired sons had been known
as "Caleb's colts." Tall and black, all of them, the "colts," so black
that the village wits said the Kimball children must have eaten smut
and soot and drunk cinder tea during the years their parents were
clearing the land. Tall and black also were all the Kimball daughters,
so tall it was their boast to be able to look out over the tops of the
window curtains; and proud enough of their height to cry with rage
when any rival Amazon came into the neighborhood.

Whatever else they were or were not, however, the Kimballs had always
been industrious and frugal. It had remained for the last scion of the
old stock to furnish a byword for slackness. In a village where
stories of outlandish, ungodly, or supernatural laziness were sacredly
preserved from year to year, Caleb Kimball's indolence easily took the
palm. His hay commonly went to seed in the field. His cow yielded her
morning's milk about noon, and her evening "mess" was taken from her
(when she was lucky) by the light of a lantern. He was a bachelor of
forty-five, dwelt alone, had no visitors and made his living, such as
it was, off the farm, with the help of a rack-o'-bones horse. He had
fifty acres of timber-land, and when his easy-going methods of farming
found him without money he simply sold a few trees.

The house and barn were gradually falling into ruins; the farm
implements stood in the yard all winter, and the sleigh all su