A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 18

In subsequent seasons when the sun shone nearly every day during haying time we used it less. But when thundershowers or occasional fogs or heavy dew came it was always open to us to put the gra.s.s through the haymaker. In a wet season it gave us a delightful feeling of independence. "Let it rain," the old Squire used to say with a smile.

"We've got the haymaker."

Late in September the first fall after we built the haymaker, there came a heavy gale that blew off fully one half the apple crop--Baldwins, Greenings, Blue Pearmains and Spitzenburgs. Since we could barrel none of the windfalls as number one fruit, that part of our harvest, more than a thousand bushels, seemed likely to prove a loss. The old Squire would never make cider to sell; and we young folks at the farm, particularly Theodora and Ellen, disliked exceedingly to dry apples by hand.

But there lay all those fair apples. It seemed such a shame to let them go to waste that the matter was on all our minds. At the breakfast table one morning Ellen remarked that we might use the haymaker for drying apples if we only had some one to pare and slice them.

"But I cannot think of any one," she added hastily, fearful lest she be asked to do the work evenings.

"Nor can I," Theodora added with equal haste, "unless some of those paupers at the town farm could be set about it."

"Poor paupers!" Addison exclaimed, laughing. "Too bad!"

"Lazy things, I say!" grandmother exclaimed. "There's seventeen on the farm, and eight of them are abundantly able to work and earn their keep."

"Yes, if they only had the wit," the old Squire said; he was one of the selectmen that year, and he felt much solicitude for the town poor.

"Perhaps they've wit enough to pare apples," Theodora remarked hopefully.

"Maybe," the old Squire said in doubt. "So far as they are able they ought to work, just as those who have to support them must work."

The old Squire, after consulting with the two other selectmen, finally offered five of the paupers fifty cents a day and their board if they would come to our place and dry apples. Three of the five were women, one was an elderly man, and the fifth was a not over-bright youngster of eighteen. So far from disliking the project all five hailed it with delight.

Having paupers round the place was by no means an unmixed pleasure. We equipped them with apple parers, corers and slicers and set them to work in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the haymaker. Large trays of woven wire were prepared to be set in rows on the rack overhead. It was then October; the fire necessary to keep the workers warm was enough to dry the trays of sliced apples almost as fast as they could be filled.

For more than a month the five paupers worked there, sometimes well, sometimes badly. They dried nearly two tons of apples, which, if I remember right, brought six cents a pound that year. The profit from that venture alone nearly paid for the haymaker.

The weather was bright the next haying time, so bright indeed that it was scarcely worth while to dry gra.s.s in the haymaker; and the next summer was just as sunny. It was in the spring of that second year that Theodora and Ellen asked whether they might not put their boxes of flower seeds and tomato seeds into the haymaker to give them an earlier start, for the spring suns warmed the ground under the gla.s.s roof while the snow still lay on the ground outside. In Maine it is never safe to plant a garden much before the middle of May; but we sometimes tried to get an earlier start by means of hotbeds on the south side of the farm buildings. In that way we used to start tomatoes, radishes, lettuce and even sweet corn, early potatoes, carrots and other vegetables, and then transplanted them to the open garden when settled warm weather came.

The girls' suggestion gave us the idea of using the haymaker as a big hothouse. The large area under gla.s.s made the scheme attractive. On the 2d of April we prepared the ground and planted enough garden seeds of all kinds to produce plants enough for an acre of land. The plants came up quickly and thrived and were successfully transplanted. A great victory was thus won over adverse nature and climate. We had sweet corn, green peas and everything else that a large garden yields a fortnight or three weeks earlier than we ever had had them before, and in such abundance that we were able to sell the surplus profitably at the neighboring village.

The sweet corn, tomatoes and other vegetables were transplanted to the outer garden early in June. Addison then suggested that we plant the ground under the haymaker to cantaloupes, and on the 4th of June we planted forty-five hills with seed.

The venture proved the most successful of all. The melon plants came up as well as they could have done in Colorado or Arizona. It is astonishing how many cantaloupes will grow on a plot of ground seventy-four feet long by nineteen feet wide. On the 16th of September we counted nine hundred and fifty-four melons, many of them large and nearly all of them yellow and finely ripened! They had matured in ninety days.

In fact, the crop proved an "embarra.s.sment of riches." We feasted on them ourselves and gave to our neighbors, and yet our store did not visibly diminish. The county fair occurred on September 22 that fall; and Addison suggested loading a farm wagon--one with a body fifteen feet long--with about eight hundred of the cantaloupes and tempting the public appet.i.te--at ten cents a melon. The girls helped us to decorate the wagon attractively with asters, dahlias, goldenrod and other autumn flowers, and they lined the wagon body with paper. It really did look fine, with all those yellow melons in it. We hired our neighbor, Tom Edwards, who had a remarkably resonant voice, to act as a "barker" for us.

The second day of the fair--the day on which the greatest crowd usually attends--we arrived with our load at eight o'clock in the morning, took up a favorable position on the grounds and cut a couple of melons in halves to show how yellow and luscious they were.

"All ready, now, Tom!" Addison exclaimed when our preparations were made. "Let's hear you earn that two dollars we've got to pay you."

Walking round in circles, Tom began:

"Muskmelons! Muskmelons grown under gla.s.s! Home-grown muskmelons! Maine muskmelons grown under a gla.s.s roof! Sweet and luscious! Only ten cents!

Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see what your old native state can do--under gla.s.s! Walk up, young fellows, and treat your girls! Don't be stingy! Only ten cents apiece--and one of these luscious melons will treat three big girls or five little ones! A paper napkin with every melon! Don't wait! They are going fast! All be gone before ten o'clock!

Try one and see what the old Pine Tree State will do--under gla.s.s!"

That is far from being the whole of Tom's "ballyhoo." Walking round and round in ever larger circles, he constantly varied his praises and his jokes. But the melons were their own best advertis.e.m.e.nt. All who bought them p.r.o.nounced them delicious; and frequently they bought one or two more to prove to their friends how good they were.

At ten o'clock we still had a good many melons; but toward noon business became very brisk, and at one o'clock only six melons were left.

In honor of this crop we rechristened the old haymaker the "cantaloupe coaxer."

CHAPTER XVI

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF GRANDPA EDWARDS

There was so much to do at the old farm that we rarely found time to play games. But we had a croquet set that Theodora, Ellen and their girl neighbor, Catherine Edwards, occasionally carried out to a little wicketed court just east of the apple house in the rear of the farm buildings.

Halstead rather disdained the game as too tame for boys and Addison so easily outplayed the rest of us that there was not much fun in it for him, unless, as Theodora used to say, he played with one hand in his pocket. But as we were knocking the b.a.l.l.s about one evening while we decided which of us should play, we saw Catherine crossing the west field. She had heard our voices and was making haste to reach us. As she approached, we saw that she looked anxious.

"Has grandpa been over here to-day?" her first words were. "He's gone.

He went out right after breakfast this morning, and he hasn't come back.

"After he went out, Tom saw him down by the line wall," she continued hurriedly. "We thought perhaps he had gone to the Corners by the meadow-brook path. But he didn't come to dinner. We are beginning to wonder where he is. Tom's just gone to the Corners to see if he is there."

"Why, no," we said. "He hasn't been here to-day."

The two back windows at the rear of the kitchen were down, and Ellen, who was washing dishes there, overheard what Catherine had said, and spoke to grandmother Ruth, who called the old Squire.

"That's a little strange," he said when Catherine had repeated her tidings to him. "But I rather think it is nothing serious. He may have gone on from the Corners to the village. I shouldn't worry."

Grandpa Jonathan Edwards--distantly related to the stern New England divine of that name--was a st.u.r.dy, strong old man sixty-seven years of age, two years older than our old Squire, and a friend and neighbor of his from boyhood. With this youthful friend, Jock, the old Squire--who then of course was young--had journeyed to Connecticut to buy merino sheep: that memorable trip when they met with Anice and Ruth Pepperill, the two girls whom they subsequently married and brought home.

For the last seventeen years matters had not been going prosperously or happily at the Edwards farm. Jonathan's only son, Jotham (Catherine and Tom's father), had married at the age of twenty and come home to live.

The old folks gave him the deed of the farm and accepted only a "maintenance" on it--not an uncommon mode of procedure. Quite naturally, no doubt, after taking the farm off his father's hands, marrying and having a family of his own, this son, Jotham, wished to manage the farm as he saw fit. He was a fairly kind, well-meaning man, but he had a hasty temper and was a poor manager. His plans seemed never to prosper, and the farm ran down, to the great sorrow and dissatisfaction of his father, Jonathan, whose good advice was wholly disregarded. The farm lapsed under a mortgage; the buildings went unrepaired, unpainted; and the older man experienced the constant grief of seeing the place that had been so dear to him going wrong and getting into worse condition every year.

Of course we young folks did not at that time know or understand much about all this; but I have learned since that Jonathan often unbosomed his troubles to the old Squire, who sympathized with him, but who could do little to improve matters.

Jotham's wife was a worthy woman, and I never heard that she did not treat the old folks well. It was the bad management and the constantly growing stress of straitened circ.u.mstances that so worried Jonathan.

Then, two years before we young folks came home to live at the old Squire's, Aunt Anice, as the neighbors called her, died suddenly of a sharp attack of pleurisy. That left Jonathan alone in the household of his son and family. He seemed, so the old Squire told me later, to lose heart entirely after that, and sat about or wandered over the farm in a state of constant discontent.

I fear, too, that his grandson, Tom, was not an unmixed comfort to him.

Tom did not mean to hurt his grandfather's feelings. He was a good-hearted boy, but impetuous and somewhat hasty. More than once we heard him go on to tell what great things he meant to do at home, "after grandpa dies." Grandpa, indeed, may sometimes have heard him say that; and it is the saddest, most hopeless thing in life for elderly people to come to see that the younger generation is only waiting for them to die.

If Grandpa Edwards had been very infirm, he might not have cared greatly; but, as I have said, at sixty-seven he was still hale and, except for a little rheumatism, apparently well.

Tom came home from the Corners that night without having learned anything of Grandpa Edwards's whereabouts. In the course of the evening his disappearance became known throughout the vicinity. The first conjectures were that he had set off on a visit somewhere and would soon return. Paying visits was not much after his manner of life; yet his family half believed that he had gone off to cheer himself up a bit.

Jotham and his wife, and Catherine, too, now remembered that he had been unusually silent for a week. A search of the room he occupied showed that he had gone away wearing his every-day clothes. I remember that the old Squire and grandmother Ruth looked grave but said very little.

Grandpa Edwards was not the kind of man to get lost. Of course he might have had a fall while tramping about and injured himself seriously or even fatally; but neither was that likely.

For several days, therefore, his family and his neighbors waited for him to return of his own accord. But when a week or more pa.s.sed and he did not come anxiety deepened; and his son and the neighbors bestirred themselves to make wider inquiries. Tardily, at last, a considerable party searched the woods and the lake sh.o.r.es; and finally as many as fifty persons turned out and spent a day and a night looking for him.

"They will not find him," the old Squire remarked with a kind of sad certainty; and he did not join the searchers himself or encourage us boys to do so. I think that both he and grandmother Ruth partly feared that, as the old lady quaintly expressed it, "Jonathan had been left to take his own life," in a fit of despondency.

The disappearance was so mysterious, indeed, and some people thought so suspicious, that the town authorities took it up. The selectmen came to the Edwards farm and made careful inquiries into all the circ.u.mstances in order to make sure there had been nothing like wrongdoing. There was not, however, the least circ.u.mstance to indicate anything of that kind.