retched the truth jest a
mite. Rev'rend Doane, it's a tarnal funny yarn but I'll walk into the
meetin' house and swear to it on a stack o'Bibles as thick as a cord of
wood.

You know I've been farming the old Corning place these past seven year?
It's good flat Connecticut bottom-land, but it isn't like our land up in
Hampshire where I was born and raised. My Pa called it the Hampshire
Grants and all that was King's land when _his_ Pa came in there and
started farming at the foot of Scuttock Mountain. That's Injun for
fires, folks say, because the Injuns used to build fires up there in the
spring for some of their heathen doodads. Anyhow, up there in the
mountains we see a tarnal power of quare things.

You call to mind the year we had the big thaw, about twelve years before
the war? You mind the blizzard that year? I heard tell it spread down
most to York. And at Fort Orange, the place they call Albany now, the
Hudson froze right over, so they say. But those York folks do a sight of
exaggerating, I'm told.

Anyhow, when the ice went out there was an almighty good thaw all over,
and when the snow run off Scuttock mountain there was a good-sized hunk
of farmland in our valley went under water. The crick on my farm flowed
over the bank and there was a foot of water in the cowshed, and down in
the swimmin' hole in the back pasture wasn't nothing but a big gully
fifty foot and more across, rushing through the pasture, deep as a lake
and brown as the old cow. You know freshet-floods? Full up with sticks
and stones and old dead trees and somebody's old shed floatin' down the
middle. And I swear to goodness, Parson, that stream was running along
so fast I saw four-inch cobblestones floating and bumping along.

I tied the cow and the calf and Kate--she was our white mare; you mind
she went lame last year and I had to shoot her, but she was just a young
mare then and skittish as all get-out--but she was a good little mare.

Anyhow, I tied the whole kit and caboodle of them in the woodshed up
behind the house, where they'd be dry, then I started to get the
milkpail. Right then I heard the gosh-awfullest screech I ever heard in
my life. Sounded like thunder and a freshet and a forest-fire all at
once. I dropped the milkpail as I heard Marthy scream inside the house,
and I run outside. Marthy was already there in the yard and she points
up in the sky and yelled, "Look up yander!"

We stood looking up at the sky over Shattuck m