as immovable as his mother.

The funeral guests arrived, and seated themselves solemnly in the
rows of chairs which had been borrowed from the neighbors. Adoniram
Judd and Ozias Lamb had carried chairs for a good part of the
forenoon. Nearly all the village people came; the strange
circumstances of this funeral, wherein there was no dead man to carry
solemnly in the midst of a long black procession to his grave, had
attracted many. Then, too, Abel Edwards had been known to them all
since his childhood, and well liked in the main, although the hard
grind of his daily life had of late years isolated him from his old
mates.

Men sat there with stiff bowed heads, and glances of solemn
furtiveness at new-comers, who had played with Abel in his boyhood,
and to whom those old memories were more real than those of the last
ten years. Abel Edwards, in the absence both of his living soul and
his dead body, was present in the minds of many as a sturdy,
light-hearted boy.

The people of Upham Corners assembled there together, dressed in
their best, displaying their most staid and decorous demeanor, showed
their fortunes in life plainly enough. Generally speaking, they were
a poor and hard-working folk--poorer and harder working than the
average people in villages. Upham Corners, from its hilly site,
freely intersected with rock ledges, was not well calculated for
profitable farming. The farms therein were mortgaged, and scarcely
fed their tillers. The water privileges were good and mills might
have flourished, but the greater markets were too far away, and few
workmen could be employed.