he road along the side of the opposite height
to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a
meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed
all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view
of Lion's Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they came
on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the
Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the
coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that
dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about
the door-yard to look at the Lion's Head, to wonder at it and mock at it,
according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have felt
that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who sold
them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if they were
very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to make much
of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were not rather
lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts scream at
night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem lonesome. When one
of them declared that if she should hear a catamount scream or a bear
growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she presumed we must all
die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a covert slant in her
words, for they were spoken with the same look she wore when she told
them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the black maple sugar
three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned upon their urgence
that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the corners of the house was
her husband, and the three lank boys with him were her sons; that the
children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were
her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but
his white head and sunburned face, into her dress and glanced at them
with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years
old. With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their
conjecture that the space walled off in the farther corner of the orchard
was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the
ladies could see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the
graves they saw were those of her husband's family and of the children
she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lo