“The old Ashby had been a hard drinker in his day and he was all broke down.  Nobody ever saw him that he couldn’t walk straight, but he got a crooked disposition out of it, if nothing else.  I s’pose there never was a man loved sperit better.  They said one year he was over to Cyrus Barker’s to help with the haying, and there was a jug o’ New England rum over by the spring with some gingerbread and cheese and stuff; and he went over about every half an hour to take something, and along about half-past ten he got the jug middling low, so he went to fill it up with a little water, and lost holt of it and it sunk, and they said he drunk the spring dry three times!

“Joe and Susan Ellen stayed there at the old place well into the summer, and then after planting they moved down to the Four Corners where they had bought a nice little place.  Joe did well there,—­he carried on the carpenter trade, and got smoothed down considerable, being amongst folks.  John he married a Pecker girl, and got his match too; she was the only living soul he ever was afraid of.  They lived on there a spell and—­why, they must have lived there all of fifteen or twenty years, now I come to think of it, for the time they moved was after the railroad was built.  ’Twas along in the winter and his wife she got a notion to buy a place down to the Falls below the Corners after the mills got started and have John work in the spinning-room while she took boarders.  She said ’twa’n’t no use staying on the farm, they couldn’t make a living off from it now they’d cut the growth.  Joe’s folks and she never could get along, and they said she was dreadfully riled up hearing how much Joe was getting in the machine shop.

“They needn’t tell me about special providences being all moonshine,” said Miss Debby for the second time, “if here wa’n’t a plain one, I’ll never say one word more about it.  You see, that very time Joe Ashby got a splinter in his eye and they were afraid he was going to lose his sight, and he got a notion that he wanted to go back to farming.  He always set everything by the old place, and he had a boy growing up that neither took to his book nor to mill work, and he wanted to farm it too.  So Joe got hold of John one day when he come in with some wood, and asked him why he wouldn’t take his place for a year or two, if he wanted to get to the village, and let him go out to the old place.  My brother Jonas was standin’ right by and heard ’em and said he never heard nobody speak civiller.  But John swore and said he wa’n’t going to be caught in no such a trap as that.  His father left him the place and he was going to do as he’d a mind to.  There’d be’n trouble about the property, for old Mr. Ashby had given Joe some money he had in the bank.  Joe had got to be well off, he could have bought most any farm about here, but he wanted the old place ’count of his attachment.  He set everything by his mother, spite of her being dead so long.  John hadn’t done very well