father did in the Revolution, but he had not
courage to speak; and perhaps if he had, some one would have hinted the
current tradition, that his father was a cowboy, and stole cattle from
the Americans, and drove and sold them to the British, and then stole
them from the British and drove them back again. The conversation soon
turned on the settlement, and the history of the oldest inhabitants.

"I tell ye what, they were rather tough times after all," said Uncle
Walter. "I remember when I cut the first tree on my farm, and stuck
the first stake for my shanty. I had come a good ways from home, and
it was going on night, and the wolves howled in hearing, and I begun to
feel dubious. Uncle Waldron heard me chopping, and come, and took me
home to his little hemlock hut. Remember it, Uncle Mose? I slep on
the softest corner of your black muck-floor, and you said I snored like
an alligator."

"The Stringers kept bachelors-hall, they say, over on the Owasco Flats,
and baked nine crusts to one jonny cake," added Colwell.

"O, my stars!" cried Nancy Nimblet, "that must have been long before we
came here; and, pray tell, Mr. Colwell, how they managed their dough."

"Why, they wet their pounded corn in water (there was no mill in these
parts then), tossed up a hunker of a loaf, laid it down on a flat stone
by the fire, and baked a crust, then peeled it off and eat it, while
another was bakin', and so on to the ninth crust of the same smokin'
cake."

"And it was thought a scrumtious kind of a thing to visit the gals in
our buff-leather breeches in them days," said Colwell.

"O, the _buff_ breeches came long after that," said Fabens. "We had
grown quite civilized and fashionable when we wore the yellow buffs.
Besides, in those times there were not many girls in the country to
visit. But if the times were tough, they gave us a great deal of
comfort. I came here with my axe on my shoulder; I cut the first tree
on my farm, too, and paid for my farm, chopping for others. I made my
first bedstead. There was an auger in the settlement--it was yours,
Uncle Walter, and I borrowed that and framed me a bedstead of maple
saplings, and laced in elm-bark in lieu of a cord, and it gave me many
pleasant sleeps.

"After a while, I wanted a carriage of some kind to bring in my grain,
and draw away my ashes. So I blocked off the wheels with my axe, from
the butt of a black oak tree, and backed home boards for a box, three
miles,