weather-beaten long before the date of our story. It had been erected
and inhabited during the Revolution, by an old Tory, who, foreseeing the
result of the war better than some of his contemporaries, and being
unwilling to expose his person to the chances of battle or his effects
to confiscation, maintained a strict neutrality, and a secret trade with
both parties; thereby welcoming peace and independence, fully stocked
with the dislike and suspicion of his neighbors, and a large quantity of
Continental "fairy-money." So, when Abner Dimock died, all he had to
leave to his only son was the red house on "Dimock's Meadow," and a
ten-acre lot of woodland behind and around the green plateau where the
house stood. These possessions he strictly entailed on his heirs
forever, and nobody being sufficiently interested in its alienation to
inquire into the State laws concerning the validity of such an entail,
the house remained in the possession of the direct line, and in the year
18-- belonged to another Abner Dimock, who kept tavern in Greenfield, a
town of Western Massachusetts, and, like his father and grandfather
before him, had one only son. In the mean time, the old house in Haddam
township had fallen into a ruinous condition, and, as the farm was very
small, and unprofitable chestnut-woodland at that, the whole was leased
to an old negro and his wife, who lived there in the most utter
solitude, scratching the soil for a few beans and potatoes, and in the
autumn gathering nuts, or in the spring roots for beer, with which Old
Jake paddled up to Middletown, to bring home a return freight of salt
pork and rum.

The town of Greenfield, small though it was, and at the very top of a
high hill, was yet the county town, subject to annual incursions of
lawyers, and such "thrilling incidents" as arise from the location of a
jail and a court-room within the limits of any village. The scenery had
a certain summer charm of utter quiet that did it good service with some