willing to risk the loss of a battle if he could watch
Rose's drooping eyelashes, the delicate down on her pink cheek, and the
feathery curls that broke away from her hair.

He was looking at her now from a distance, for she and Mite Shapley were
assisting Jed Towle to pile up the tin plates and tie the tin dippers
together. Next she peered into one of the bean-pots, and seemed pleased
that there was still something in its depths; then she gathered the
fragments neatly together in a basket, and, followed by her friend,
clambered down the banks to a shady spot where 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 Gypsy 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 did n'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 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