you," and still holding his grief-wrung face averted, that Reuben
might not see it, he went forth, and Bement shut the door and barred
it.




CHAPTER FOURTH

THE PEOPLE ASK BREAD AND RECEIVE A STONE


As Captain Hamlin, leaving behind him Great Barrington and its
tavern-jail, was riding slowly on toward Stockbridge, oblivious in the
bitter tumult of his feelings, to the glorious scenery around him,
Stockbridge Green was the scene of a quite unusual assemblage. Squire
Sedgwick, the town's delegate, was expected back that afternoon from
the county convention, which had been sitting at Lenox, to devise
remedies for the popular distress, and the farmers from the outlying
country had generally come into the village to get the first tidings
of the result of its deliberations.

Seated on the piazza of the store, and standing around it, at a distance
from the assemblage of the common people, suitably typifying their
social superiority, was a group of the magnates of Stockbridge, in the
stately dress of gentlemen of the olden time, their three-cornered hats
resting upon powdered wigs, and long silk hose revealing the goodly
proportions of their calves. Upon the piazza sits a short, portly
gentleman, with bushy black eyebrows and a severe expression of
countenance. Although a short man he has a way of holding his neck