es the main road. His
house is the usual stopping place for travelers. He has imposed the
labor of their entertainment upon his women folks, not so much for
profit as to hear the news and chit-chat of the outside world.

The house is a structure of three large pens of logs with a dog trot
(hallway) between. Two front the road, the third forms an ell at the
rear and is flanked by a long porch. The whole is covered by a rough
clapboard roof. Each pen has a sandstone chimney and each room a large,
open fireplace. The ell is used as a kitchen, dining-room and storehouse
combined. On the edge of the porch, almost within reach of the well
sweep, a bench holds two tin wash basins; a cake of laundry soap reposes
in the former coffin of a family of sardines and a roller towel,
sterilized and dried by air and sunlight, hangs pendant from the eaves.

The travelers as they rode up and stiffly dismounted noted the many
chickens going to roost and the three cows occupying the road in front
of the house. The barn was rather an imposing structure. These signs
assured eggs, milk and butter for themselves and feed and comfortable
quarters for their horses.

After supper they sat out in the moonlight on a crooked, half uprooted
elm overhanging the creek, until the world grew worshipfully still as it
does twenty miles from a railroad; their quiet, contented thoughts
undisturbed by the call of the whippoorwills in the near thickets and
the hooting of a great owl far down the valley.

Then they were joined by their host, a tall, rawboned, sallow,
sandy-haired man with a long, thin face on which grew a straggly beard,
which had never known shears or razor. He had come out to hear more news
than he had been able to learn at supper, where table manners demanded
that he should eat and get through with it. At the table the men ate
saying little, while the old woman and her daughters served them, and in
silence.

His youngest boy, Caleb, came with him, an immodest little fellow; made
so by his father, who it seemed spent most of his time boasting of the
boy's accomplishments.

"Well, rested yet? Thar's a boy what's gwinter make a lawyer. He's just
turned nine and you can't believe nothin' he says. He can argy any thing
out'er his maw and the gals and the boys nigh bout hayr haint got no
show with him; somehow he gits every thing they gits hold on. And you
oughter see him shoot with a squirrel gun! Many a time he's knocked the
bark out from