railway station. A good
location for a hotel, you will say. Precisely; but there has always been
a hotel there, and for the last dozen years it has been pretty well
patronized--by one boarder. Not to trifle with an intelligent public, I
will state at once that, in the early part of this century, Greenton was
a point at which the mail-coach on the Great Northern Route stopped to
change horses and allow the passengers to dine. People in the county,
wishing to take the early mail Portsmouth-ward, put up over night at the
old tavern, famous for its irreproachable larder and soft feather-beds.
The tavern at that time was kept by Jonathan Bayley, who rivaled his
wallet in growing corpulent, and in due time passed away. At his death
the establishment, which included a farm, fell into the hands of a
son-in-law. Now, though Bayley left his son-in-law a hotel--which sounds
handsome--he left him no guests; for at about the period of the old
man's death the old stage-coach died also. Apoplexy carried off one, and
steam the other. Thus, by a sudden swerve in the tide of progress, the
tavern at the Corners found itself high and dry, like a wreck on a
sand-bank. Shortly after this event, or maybe contemporaneously, there
was some attempt to build a town at Greenton; but it apparently failed,
if eleven cellars choked up with _debris_ and overgrown with burdocks
are any indication of failure. The farm, however, was a good farm, as
things go in New Hampshire, and Tobias Sewell, the son-in-law, could
afford to snap his fingers at the traveling public if they came near
enough--which they never did.

The hotel remains to-day pretty much the same as when Jonathan Bayley
handed in his accounts in 1840, except that Sewell has from time to
time sold the furniture of some of the upper chambers to bridal couples
in the neighborhood. The bar is still open, and the parlor door says
PARLOUR in tall black letters. Now and then a passing drover looks in at
that lonely bar-room, where a high-shouldered bottle of Santa Cruz rum
ogles with a peculiarly knowing air a shriveled lemon on a shelf; now
and then a farmer rides across country to talk crops and stock and take
a friendly glass with Tobias; and now and then a circus caravan with
speckled ponies, or a menagerie with a soggy elephant, halts under the
swinging sign, on which there is a dim mail-coach with four phantomish
horses driven by a portly gentleman whose head has been washed off by
the rain.