e out that his two fathers were his father
and his grandfather. He looked troubled for a moment when I inquired the
whereabouts of the poorhouse, in the direction of which we happened to
be going. He entertained a very decided opinion that he shouldn't like
to live there; a wholesome aversion, I am bound to maintain, dear Uncle
Venner to the contrary notwithstanding.

A stranger was not an every-day sight in Dyer's Hollow, I imagine, and
as I went up and down the road a good many times in the course of my
visit, I came to be pretty well known. So it happened that a Western
Islands woman came to her front door once, broom in hand and the
sweetest of smiles on her face, and said, "Thank you for that five cents
you gave my little boy the other day." "Put that in your pocket," I had
said, and the obedient little man did as he was bidden, without so much
as a side glance at the denomination of the coin. But he forgot one
thing, and when his mother asked him, as of course she did, for mothers
are all alike, "Did you thank the gentleman?" he could do nothing but
hang his head. Hence the woman's smile and "thank you," which made me so
ashamed of the paltriness of the gift (Thackeray never saw a boy without
wanting to give him a _sovereign_!) that my mention of the matter here,
so far from indicating an ostentatious spirit, ought rather to be taken
as a mark of humility.

All things considered, I should hardly choose to settle for life in
Dyer's Hollow; but with every recollection of the place I somehow feel
as if its score or two of inhabitants were favored above other men. Why
is it that people living thus by themselves, and known thus transiently
and from the outside as it were, always seem in memory like dwellers in
some land of romance? I cannot tell, but so it is; and whoever has such
a picture on the wall of his mind will do well, perhaps, never to put
the original beside it. Yet I do not mean to speak quite thus of Dyer's
Hollow. Once more, at least, I hope to walk the length of that
straggling road. As I think of it now, I behold again those beds of
shining bearberry ("resplendent" would be none too fine a word; there is
no plant for which the sunlight does more), loaded with a wealth of
handsome red fruit. The beach-plum crop was a failure; plum wine, of the
goodness of which I heard enthusiastic reports, would be scarce; but one
needed only to look at the bearberry patches to perceive that Cape Cod
sand was not wanti