ught dreams which only the strong light of day could
disprove to be realities.

CHAPTER THIRD.

THE FARMER-FOLKS FROM THE WEST.

With the following day, (which was calm, gentle, and serene as its
predecessor,) a little after the dispatch of dinner, the attention of
the household was summoned to the clatter of a hurrying wagon, which,
unseen, resounded in the distant country. Old Sylvester was the first to
hear it--faintly at first, then it rose on the wind far off, died away
in the woods and the windings of the roads, then again was entirely lost
for several minutes, and at last growing into a portentous rattle,
brought to at the door of the homestead, and landed from its ricketty
and bespattered bosom Mr. Oliver Peabody, of Ohio; Jane his wife, a
buxom lady of fair complexion, in a Quaker bonnet; and Robert, their
eldest son, a tall, flat-featured boy, some thirteen years of age.

The countryman in a working shirt, who had the control of the wagon, and
who had been beguiled by Oliver some five miles out of his road home,
(to which he was returning from the market town,) under pretence of a
wish to have his opinion of the crops--the poor fellow being withal a
hired laborer and never having owned, or entertained the remotest
speculation of owning, a rood of ground of his own,--with a commendation
from Oliver, delivered with a cheerful smile, that "his observations on
timothy were very much to the purpose," drove clattering away again. Mr.
Oliver Peabody, farmer, who had come all the way from Ohio to spend
thanksgiving with his old father--of a ruddy, youthful and twinkling
countenance--who wore his hair at length and unshorn, and the chief
peculiarity of whose dress was a grey cloth coat, with a row of great
horn-buttons on either breast, with enormous woollen mittens, brought
his buxom wife forward under one arm with diligence, drawing his tall
youth of a son after him by the other hand--threw himself into the bosom
of the Peabody family, and was heartily welcomed all round. He didn't
say a word of half-horses and half-alligators, nor of greased lightning,
although he was from the West, but he did complain most bitterly of the
uncommon smoothness of the roads in these parts, the short grass, and
the 'bominable want of elbow-room all over the neighborhood. It was with
difficulty he could be kept on the straitened stage of the balcony long
enough to answer a few plain questions of children and other matters at