A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 31

"Ef you will believe it," Uncle Solon concluded, "not one of them cows teched an oak acorn afterward."

Another laugh went round; but an interruption occurred. A good lady from the city, who was spending the summer at a farmhouse near by, rose in indignation and made herself heard.

"I think that was a very cruel thing to do!" she cried. "I think it was shameful to treat your animals so!"

"Wal, now, ma'am, I'm glad you spoke as you did. I'm glad to know that you've got a kind heart," said Uncle Solon. "Kind-heartedness to man and beast is one of the best things in life. It's what holds this world together. Anybody that uses Cayenne pepper to torture an animal, or play tricks on it, is no friend of mine, I can tell ye.

"But you see, ma'am, it is this way. Country folks who keep dumb animals of all kinds know a good many things about them that city folks don't.

Like human beings, dumb animals sometimes go all wrong, and have to be corrected. Of course, we can't reason with them. So we have to do the next best thing, and correct them as we can.

"I had a little dog once that I was tremendous fond of," Uncle Solon continued. "His name was Spot. He was a bird-dog, and so bright it seemed as if he could almost talk. But he took to suckin' eggs, and began to steal eggs at my neighbors' barns and hen-houses. He would fetch home eggs without crackin' the sh.e.l.ls, and hold 'em in his mouth so cunning you wouldn't know he had anything there. He used to bury them eggs in the garden and all about.

"Of course that made trouble with the neighbors. It looked as if I'd have to kill Spot, and I hated to do it, for I loved that little dog.

But I happened to think of Cayenne. So I took and blowed an egg--made a hole at each end and blowed out the white and the yelk. I mixed the white with Cayenne pepper and put it back through the hole. Then I stuck little pieces of white paper over both holes, and laid the egg where I knew Spot would find it.

"He found it, and about three minutes after that I saw him going to the brook in a hurry. He had quite a time on't, slos.h.i.+n' water, coolin' off his mouth--and I never knew him to touch an egg afterward.

"But I see, ma'am, that you have got quite a robustious prejudice against Cayenne. It isn't such bad stuff, after all. It's fiery, but it never does any permanent harm. It's a good medicine, too, for a lot of things that ail us. Why, Cayenne pepper saved my life once. I really think so. It was when I was a boy, and boy-like, I had et a lot of green artichokes. A terrible pain took hold of me. I couldn't breathe. I thought I was surely going to die; but my mother gave me a dose of Cayenne and mola.s.ses, and in ten minutes I was feeling better.

"And even now, old as I am, when I get cold and feel pretty bad, I go and take a good stiff dose of Cayenne and mola.s.ses, and get to bed. In fifteen minutes I will be in a perspiration; pretty soon I'll go to sleep; and next morning I'll feel quite smart again.

"Just you try that, ma'am, the next time you get a cold. You will find it will do good. It is better than so much of that quinin that they are givin' us nowadays. That quinin raises Cain with folks' ears. It permanently injures the hearin'.

"When I advise any one to use Cayenne, either to cure a dog that sucks eggs or cows that eat acorns, I advise it as a medicine, just as I would ef the animal was sick. And you mustn't think, ma'am, that we farmers are so hard-hearted and cruel as all that, for our hearts are just as tender and compa.s.sionate to animals as if we lived in a great city."

Uncle Solon may not have been a safe guide for the nation's finances, but he possessed a valuable knowledge of farm life and farm affairs.

I went home; and the next morning we tried the quaint old Greenbacker's "cure" for bitter milk; it "worked" as he said it would.

We also made a sticky wash, of which Cayenne was the chief ingredient, for the trunks of the young trees along the lanes and in the orchard, and after getting a taste of it, neither the Black Dutch belted heifers nor the hogs did any further damage. A young neighbor of ours has also cured her pet cat of slyly pilfering eggs at the stable, in much the way Uncle Solon cured his dog.

CHAPTER XXVII

ON THE DARK OF THE MOON

In a little walled inclosure near the roadside at the old Squire's stood two very large pear-trees that at a distance looked like Lombardy poplars; they had straight, upright branches and were fully fifty feet tall. One was called the Eastern Belle and the other the Indian Queen.

They had come as little shoots from grandmother Ruth's people in Connecticut when she and the old Squire were first married. Grandmother always spoke of them as "Joe's pear-trees"; Joseph was the old Squire's given name. Some joke connected with their early married life was in her mind when she spoke thus, for she always laughed roguishly when she said "Joe's pears," but she would never explain the joke to us young folks.

She insisted that those were the old Squire's pears, and told us not to pick them.

In the orchard behind the house were numerous other pear-trees. There were no restrictions on those or on the early apples or plums; but every year grandmother half jokingly told us not to go to those two trees in the walled inclosure, and she never went there herself.

I must confess, however, that we young folks knew pretty well how those pears tasted. The Eastern Belle bore a large, long pear that turned yellow when ripe and had a fine rosy cheek on one side. The Indian Queen was a thick-bodied pear with specks under the skin, a deep-sunk nose and a long stem. It had a tendency to crack on one side; but it ripened at about the same time as the Belle, and its flavor was even finer.

The little walled pen that inclosed the two pear-trees had a history of its own. The town had built it as a "pound" for stray animals in 1822, shortly after the neighborhood was settled. The walls were six or seven feet high, and on one side was a gateway. The inclosure was only twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. It had not been used long as a pound, for a pound that was larger and more centrally situated became necessary soon after it was built. When those two little pear-trees came from Connecticut the old Squire set them out inside this walled pen; he thought they would be protected by the high pound wall. A curious circ.u.mstance about those pear-trees was that they did not begin bearing when they were nine or ten years old, as pear-trees usually do. Year after year pa.s.sed, until they had stood there twenty-seven years, with never blossom or fruit appearing on them.

The old Squire tried various methods of making the trees bear. At the suggestion of neighbors he drove rusty nails into the trunks, and buried bags of pear seeds at the foot of them, and he fertilized the inclosure richly. But all to no purpose. Finally grandmother advised the old Squire to spread the leached ashes from her leach tub--after she had made soap and hulled corn in the spring--on the ground inside the pen.

The old Squire did so, and the next spring both trees blossomed. They bore bountifully that summer and every season afterward, until they died.

We had a young neighbor, Alfred Batchelder, who was fond of foraging by night for plums, grapes, and pears in the orchards of his neighbors. His own family did not raise fruit; they thought it too much trouble to cultivate the trees. But Alfred openly boasted of having the best fruit that the neighborhood afforded. One of Alfred's cronies in these nocturnal raids was a boy, named Harvey Yeatton, who lived at the village, six or seven miles away; almost every year he came to visit Alfred for a week or more in September.

It was a good-natured community. To early apples, indeed, the rogues were welcome; but garden pears, plums, and grapes were more highly prized, for in Maine it requires some little care to raise them. At the farm of our nearest neighbors, the Edwardses, there were five greengage trees that bore delicious plums. For three summers in succession Alfred and Harvey stole nearly every plum on those trees--at least, there was little doubt that it was they who took them.

They also took the old Squire's pears in the walled pen. Twice Addison and I tracked them home the next morning in the dewy gra.s.s, across the fields. Time and again, too, they took our Bartlett pears and plums.

Addison wanted the old Squire to send the sheriff after them and put a stop to their raids, but he only laughed. "Oh, I suppose those boys love pears and plums," he said, forbearingly. But we of the younger generation were indignant.

One day, when the old Squire and I were driving to the village, we met Alfred; the old gentleman stopped, and said to him:

"My son, hadn't you better leave me just a few of those pears in the old pound this year?"

"I never touched a pear there!" Alfred shouted. "You can't prove I did, and you'd better not accuse me."

The old Squire only laughed, and drove on.

A few nights afterward both pear-trees were robbed and nearly stripped of fruit. We found several broken twigs on the top branches, and guessed that Alfred had used a long pole with a hook at the end with which to shake down the fruit. After what had pa.s.sed on the road this action looked so much like defiance that the old Squire was nettled. He did nothing about it at the time, however.

Another year pa.s.sed. Then at table one night Ellen remarked that Harvey Yeatton had come to visit Alfred again. "Alfred brought him up from the village this afternoon," she said. "I saw them drive by together."

"Now the pears and plums will have to suffer again!" said I.

"Yes," said Ellen. "They stopped down at the foot of the hill, and looked up at those two pear-trees in the old pound; then they glanced at the house, to see if any one had noticed that they were pa.s.sing."

"Those pears are just getting ripe," said Addison. "It wouldn't astonish me if they disappeared to-night. There's no moon, is there?"

"No," said grandmother Ruth. "It's the dark of the moon. Joseph, you had better look out for your pears to-night," she added, laughing.

The old Squire went on eating his supper for some minutes without comment; but just as we finished, he said, "Boys, where did we put our skunk fence last fall?"

"Rolled it up and put it in the wagon-house chamber," said I.

"About a hundred and fifty feet of it, isn't there?"

"A hundred and sixty," said Addison. "Enough, you know, to go round that patch of sweet corn in the garden."

"That wire fence worked well with four-footed robbers," the old Squire remarked, with a twinkle in his eye. "Perhaps it might serve for the two-footed kind. You fetch that down, boys; I've an idea we may use it to-night."

For several summers the garden had been ravaged by skunks. Although carnivorous by nature, the little pests seem to have a great liking for sweet corn when in the milk.

Wire fence, woven in meshes, such as is now used everywhere for poultry yards, had then recently been advertised. We had sent for a roll of it, two yards in width, and thereafter every summer we had put it up round the corn patch. None of the pests ever scaled the wire fence; and thereafter we had enjoyed our sweet corn in peace.

That night, just after dusk, we reared the skunk fence on top of the old pound wall, and fastened it securely in an upright position all round the inclosure. The wall was what Maine farmers call a "double wall"; it was built of medium-sized stones, and was three or four feet wide at the top. It was about six feet high, and when topped with the wire made a fence fully twelve feet in height.

The old pound gate had long ago disappeared; in its place were two or three little bars that could easily be let down. The trespa.s.sers would naturally enter by that gap, and on a moonless night would not see the wire fence on top of the wall. They would have more trouble in getting out of the place than they had had in getting into it if the gap were to be stopped.

At the farm that season were two hired men, brothers named James and Asa Doane, strong, active young fellows; and since it was warm September weather, the old Squire asked them to make a shake-down of hay for themselves that night behind the orchard wall, near the old pound, and to sleep there "with one eye open." If the rogues did not come for the pears, we would take down the skunk fence early the next morning, and set it again for them the following night.