Westbury. He began to recall
connections and events, and related how a certain Hezekiah Lee, whose
name was on one of them, had decided, some fifty years before, to give
up farming and go to counterfeiting. His career from that moment had
been a busy one; he had been always traveling one way or the other
between affluence and the penitentiary. His last term had been a long
one, and when he got out, styles in national currency had changed a good
deal and Uncle Hezekiah couldn't seem to get the hang of the new
designs. So he took to preaching, and held camp-meetings. He lived to
be eighty-seven, and people had traveled forty miles to his funeral.

I said I would keep Uncle Hezekiah's headstone. In the end we made an
inside walk of the collection, for the old cellar had a dirt floor and
was not always dry, but we laid them face down. When we had raked and
swept, and brushed and put back the articles accepted by the board, and
all was trim and neat, Westbury looked in.

"Looks nice," he said, and added, "that's what you've got now, but by
and by you'll have your mess of old truck, too, and the next man will
cart a lot of it to the wood-pile, just as you're carting it now."

I said I thought we would begin our career with a coat of whitewash.
Westbury noticed something sticking out from an overhead beam, and drew
out a long-handled wrought-iron toasting-fork. Looking and prying about,
we discovered an old pair of brass snuffers, and a pair of hand-made
wrought-iron shears. The old things were pretty rusty, and I could see
that Westbury did not value them highly, but I would not have traded
them for the pork-barrel and the ham-barrel and all the other barrels
and benches reserved from Uncle Joe's collection. 'Lias Mullins,
inspecting them, became reflective:

"Them's from away back in old Ben Meeker's time," he said, "or mebbe
furder than that. The' ain't been no scissors made by hand in this
country since my time, an' a good while before. I guess old Ben was a
good hand to have things made. I've heard my father tell that when he
was a boy Cap'n Ben, as they called him, one day found his door-sill
split, an' went to the blacksmith shop an' had one made out of iron.
Father said it was a big curiosity, and everybody went to look at it.
That would be fully a hundred years ago, when the' wasn't so much to
talk about. He said that the biggest piece of news in Brook Ridge for a
good while was that Cap'n Ben had an iron door-sill