my weight to it and amid much laughter but without any
difficulty lowered myself to the ground.

In fact, I was not exactly the hero. The hero, I think, was Willis. But
for his appearance I hardly know how I should have fared.

Old Hughy, I remember, was rather loath to share the honey with us; but
we all took enough to satisfy us. The old man, indeed, was hardly the
hero of the occasion either--a fact that he became aware of when on our
way home we met grandmother Ruth, anxious and red in the face from her
long walk. She expressed herself to him with great frankness. "Didn't
you promise to be careful where you sent that boy!" she exclaimed. "Hugh
Glinds, you are a palavering old humbug!"

Old Hughy had little enough to say; but he tried to smooth matters over
by offering her a piece of honey-comb.

"No, sir," said she. "I want none of your honey!"

All that the old Squire had said when he saw me up in the hemlock was,
"Be calm, my son; you will get down safe." And when they threw the rope
up to me he added, "Now, first tie a square knot and then take good hold
of the rope with both hands."

CHAPTER XXV

WHEN THE LION ROARED

At daybreak on September 26, if I remember aright, we started to drive
from the old farm to Portland with eighteen live hogs. There was a crisp
frost that morning, so white that till the sun rose you might have
thought there had been a slight fall of snow in the night.

We put eight of the largest hogs into one long farm wagon with high
sideboards, drawn by a span of Percheron work horses, which I drove; the
ten smaller hogs we put into another wagon that Willis Murch drove. By
making an early start we hoped to cover forty miles of our journey
before sundown, pass the night at a tavern in the town of Gray where the
old Squire was acquainted, and reach Portland the next noon. Since we
wished to avoid unloading the hogs, we took dry corn and troughs for
feeding them in the wagons and buckets for fetching water to them. The
old Squire went along with us for the first fifteen miles to see us well
on our way, then left us and walked to a railroad station a mile or two
off the wagon road, where he took the morning train into Portland, in
order to make arrangements for marketing the hogs.

Everything went well during the morning, although the hogs diffused
a bad odor along the highway. Toward noon we stopped by the wayside,
near the Upper Village of the New Gloucester Shakers, to rest