epeated.

But he lived to be ninety-eight, and I can truly say that those last
years with him at the old farm, going about or driving round together,
were the happiest of my life.

CHAPTER XVII

OUR FOURTH OF JULY AT THE DEN

Farm work as usual occupied us quite closely during May and June that
year; and ere long we began to think of what we would do on the
approaching Fourth of July. So far as we could hear, no public
celebration was being planned either at the village in our own town, or
in any of the towns immediately adjoining. Apparently we would have to
organize our own celebration, if we had one; and after talking the
matter over with the other young folks of the school district, we
decided to celebrate the day by making a picnic excursion to the "Den,"
and carrying out a long contemplated plan for exploring it.

The Den was a pokerish cavern near Overset Pond, nine or ten miles to
the northeast of the old Squire's place, about which clung many legends.

In the spring of 1839 a large female panther is said to have been
trapped there, and an end made of her young family. Several bears, too,
had been surprised inside the Den, for the place presented great
attractions as a secure retreat from winter cold. But the story that
most interested us was a tradition that somewhere in the recesses of the
cave the notorious Androscoggin Indian Adwanko had hidden a bag of
silver money that he had received from the French for the scalps of
white settlers.

The entrance to the cave fronts the pond near the foot of a precipitous
mountain, called the Fall-off. A wilder locality, or one of more
sinister aspect, can hardly be imagined. The cave is not spacious
within; it is merely a dark hole among great granite rocks. By means of
a lantern or torch you can penetrate to a distance of seventy feet or
more.

One day when three of us boys had gone to Overset Pond to fish for trout
we plucked up our courage and crawled into it. We crept along for what
seemed to us a great distance till we found the passage obstructed by a
rock that had apparently fallen from overhead. We could move the stone a
little, but we did not dare to tamper with it much, for fear that other
stones from above would fall. We believed that Adwanko's bag of silver
was surely in some recess beyond the rock and at once began to lay plans
for blasting out the stone with powder. By using a long fuse, the person
that fired the charge would have time to g