In this strictly agricultural town, I found every type of the genuine unadulterated yankee stock.  When I called on Mrs. Jones to furnish her share of the perambulating schoolmaster’s provisions, she remarked, “I can eat you, but I can’t sleep you, because I have no spare bedroom.”  With feigned terror, I said that I feared I would not be a very toothsome subject for a cannibal, thereupon she gave me the glad hand, “come right in, my poor thing, and we will fat you up for our Thanksgiving dinner.”  I entered, and ate my hog and doughnuts with gladness of heart, for she was the most buxom, joyous, and hospitable Betsy imaginable.

It was she who cheered the house and the hearth more than all the Christmas fires, an old-fashioned, thoroughly good woman, entirely happy without the aid of diamonds, finery, or long-tailed gowns to trail through the mud and sweep the streets.  It was extremely refreshing to see this really sensible, natural human being, as rare in this age as an oasis in the desert.

Her husband came in smiling, a veritable brother Jonathan, hale and hearty, though tired, for he had arisen from bed at three o’clock that morning, milked a dozen cows, done chores enough to kill a dozen dapper city clerks, and then tramped beside his oxen through the deep snow, taking a load of wood to sell in Dover nearly twenty miles away.

This load he had labored hard for two days to cut on the mountainside, and it brought him the munificent sum of three dollars, yet he was happier than any multi-millionaire I ever saw.  There were stumps he had dug out, and rocks he had picked on his farm, enough to fence his hundred acres almost sky-high; but even then he said he had to shoot his corn and potatoes out of a gun to get them through the stones into the ground.

This family was the life of every husking-bee, where each red ear of corn led to rollicking fun, resounding smacks on rosy cheeks, and of paring-bees when even numbered apple-seeds were the match-makers for bachelors and maids.  They often took prizes in my spelling-matches, when the bashful swains were allowed to clasp hands with their sweethearts, which led to many lifelong hand and heart clasps in this good old-fashioned town where there were no despairing old maids nor lone, lorn, grouty unmated men.

They went every Sunday to whittle sticks, swap jack-knives and horses, and to listen to the white-haired parson who led them by the resistless rhetoric of a blameless life, as well as by his heartfelt prayers and exhortations in those “ways which are ways of pleasantness and those paths which are paths of peace.”

“One hot summer’s day,” the farmer told me, “the elder was preaching to a very drowsy crowd after a hard week’s work in the hayfield, when suddenly he stopped and shouted:  ‘Fire!  Fire!’ at the top of his lungs.  ‘Where? where?’ cried some ex-snorers jumping to their feet.  ‘In hell,’ cried the indignant parson, ’for those who sleep under the sound of the gospel.’”