b had been working for my father five years before I was born. He
was not a strong man and had never been able to carry the wide swath of
the other help in the fields, but we all loved him for his kindness and
his knack of story-telling. He was a bachelor who came over the mountain
from Pleasant Valley, a little bundle of clothes on his shoulder, and
bringing a name that enriched the nomenclature of our neighbourhood. It
was Eben Holden.

He had a cheerful temper and an imagination that was a very wilderness
of oddities. Bears and panthers growled and were very terrible in that
strange country. He had invented an animal more treacherous than any
in the woods, and he called it a swift. 'Sumthin' like a panther', he
described the look of it a fearsome creature that lay in the edge of
the woods at sundown and made a noise like a woman crying, to lure the
unwary. It would light one's eye with fear to hear Uncle Eb lift his
voice in the cry of the swift. Many a time in the twilight when the bay
of a hound or some far cry came faintly through the wooded hills, I
have seen him lift his hand and bid us hark. And when we had listened
a moment, our eyes wide with wonder, he would turn and say in a low,
half-whispered tone: ''S a swift' I suppose we needed more the fear of
God, but the young children of the pioneer needed also the fear of the
woods or they would have strayed to their death in them.

A big bass viol, taller than himself, had long been the solace of his
Sundays. After he had shaved--a ceremony so solemn that it seemed a rite
of his religion--that sacred viol was uncovered. He carried it sometimes
to the back piazza and sometimes to the barn, where the horses shook and
trembled at the roaring thunder of the strings. When he began playing
we children had to get well out of the way, and keep our distance. I
remember now the look of him, then--his thin face, his soft black eyes,
his long nose, the suit of broadcloth, the stock and standing collar
and, above all, the solemnity in his manner when that big devil of a
thing was leaning on his breast.

As to his playing I have never heard a more fearful sound in any time of
peace or one less creditable to a Christian. Weekdays he was addicted to
the milder sin of the flute and, after chores, if there were no one to
talk with him, he would sit long and pour his soul into that magic bar
of boxwood.

Uncle Eb had another great accomplishment. He was what they call in the
no