e the Boomshers, otherwise
known as the Crambry family, were "lined up" expectantly.

It is not difficult to find a single fool in any community, however
small; but a family of fools is fortunately somewhat rarer. Every
county, however, can boast of one fool-family, and York County is
always in the fashion, with fools as with everything else. The unique,
much-quoted, and undesirable Boomshers could not be claimed as
indigenous to the Saco valley, for this branch was an offshoot of a
still larger tribe inhabiting a distant township. Its beginnings were
shrouded in mystery. There was a French-Canadian ancestor somewhere, and
a Gipsy or Indian grandmother. They had always intermarried from time
immemorial. When one of the selectmen of their native place had been
asked why the Boomshers always married cousins, and why the habit was
not discouraged, he replied that he really didn't know; he s'posed they
felt it would be kind of odd to go right out and marry a stranger.

Lest "Boomsher" seem an unusual surname, it must be explained that the
actual name was French and could not be coped with by Edgewood or
Pleasant River, being something quite as impossible to spell as to
pronounce. As the family had lived for the last few years somewhere near
the Killick Cranberry Meadows, they were called--and completely
described in the calling--the Crambry fool-family. A talented and much
traveled gentleman who once stayed over night at the Edgewood tavern,
proclaimed it his opinion that Boomsher had been gradually corrupted
from Beaumarchais. When he wrote the word on his visiting card and
showed it to Mr. Wiley, Old Kennebec had replied, that in the judgment
of a man who had lived in large places and seen a turrible lot o' life,
such a name could never have been given either to a Christian or a
heathen family,--that the way in which the letters was thrown together
into it, and the way in which they was sounded when read out loud, was
entirely ag'in reason. It was true, he said, that Beaumarchais, bein'
such a fool name, might 'a' be'n invented a-purpose for a fool family,
but he wouldn't hold even with callin' 'em Boomsher; Crambry was well
enough for'em an' a sight easier to speak.

Stephen knew a good deal about the Crambrys, for he passed their
so-called habitation in going to one of his wood-lots. It was only a
month before that he had found them all sitting outside their
broken-down fence, surrounded by decrepit chairs, sofas, tab