was decidedly romantic; but the plain people living in that vicinity
knew but little of romance. If they saved time from hard labor to read
their Bible, it was certainly a subject for thankfulness. Most of them
thought that Snag-Orchard was a gloomy place, and that it was a pity
for so much good ground to be taken up with overgrown trees. It suited
Mr. Croswell, however, who was the former proprietor. He had but little
interest in the land belonging to this world, for all his relatives,
nearly every one, had gone to the land that is "very far off." He loved
the trees, and seemed to us like an old tree himself, from which
kindred branch and spray had fallen, leaving him in the world's
wilderness alone. Some thought him melancholy; but he was not: he was
only waiting upon the shore of that river dividing the "blessed land"
from ours; and one spring morning, very suddenly to his neighbors, he
crossed that river, and found more, infinitely more than he had ever
lost. After he was gone, the house was closed for a time; and through
the bright days of the following summer, when the foliage became heavy
upon the old trees, casting so deep a shadow as to make noonday but
twilight there, and when the night breeze sang mournfully among the
pines in the rear of that old house, people coming from the pond by the
way of the plain looked stealthily over their shoulders at
Snag-Orchard: but they knew not why, for nothing was there--nothing but
loneliness and desertion.

There was a report among the school children that the Croswell house
was haunted; and in his merry moods poor Graffam had told the boys, how
many a time upon a dark night, when going from Motley's Mills to his
house upon the plain, he had seen that house brilliantly illuminated,
and once or twice had heard old Mr. Croswell call to him from the
window, and say, "Beware, Graffam, beware." Little, however, was
thought of these stories, for we all knew that the unhappy man often