ead of permanent inhabitants; they had built their own house, and
had the air of intending to live in it all the year round.

"Are you not going to call on them?" I asked my wife one morning.

"When they call on _us_," she replied lightly.

"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."

This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife
turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her
intuitions in these matters.

She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "Not at
home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of
our way to be courteous.

I saw a great deal of our neighbors, nevertheless. Their cottage lay
between us and the post-office--where _he_ was never to be met with by
any chance--and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in the
garden. Floriculture did not appear so much an object as exercise.
Possibly it was neither; maybe they were engaged in digging for
specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets, which are continually
coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the
plowshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or domestic
utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held this
domain--an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn descendant of
which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book, down to the
close of the Southern war, as a state pensioner. At that period she
appears to have struck a trail to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I quote
from the local historiographer.

Whether they were developing a kitchen garden, or emulating Professor
Schliemann, at Mycenae, the newcomers were evidently persons of refined
musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable sweetness,
although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by
the high gate and listen to her executing an arietta, conjecturally at
some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike.
The husband, somewhere about the ground, would occasionally respond with
two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business. They
seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds
whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.

There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I
admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in
the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like