That settled it; Westbury was acknowledged authority. Sam rolled out two vinegar-barrels, both pronounced good. Following there came what seemed at least a hundred apple-barrels, potato-barrels, turnip-barrels, ash-barrels, boxes, benches, sections of shelving, and a general heap of debris, some of it unrecognizable even by 'Lias Mullins, oldest member of the board.
"It was a Meeker habit to throw nothing away," commented Westbury, as he looked over the assortment. "No matter what it was, they thought they might want it, some day. You'll find the same thing when you get to the attic."
At this moment Sam discovered in a dark corner a heap of flat slabs that, brought to light, proved to be small tombstones. Westbury grinned.
"Those were put over the cemetery fence," he said, "whenever the relatives bought bigger ones. Uncle Joe brought a lot of them home to cool his milk on."
I looked at them doubtfully. They were nothing but stones, and they had served their original purpose. Still, it had been a rather particular purpose and they were carved with certain names and dates. I was not sure that their owners might not sometime—some weird fall evening, say—take a notion to claim them.
They opened the door of history to Westbury. He began to recall connections and events, and related how a certain Hezekiah Lee, whose name was on one of them, had decided, some fifty years before, to give up farming and go to counterfeiting. His career from that moment had been a busy one; he had been always traveling one way or the other between affluence and the penitentiary. His last term had been a long one, and when he got out, styles in national currency had changed a good deal and Uncle Hezekiah couldn't seem to get the hang of the new designs. So he took to preaching, and held camp-meetings. He lived to be eighty-seven, and people had traveled forty miles to his funeral.
I said I would keep Uncle Hezekiah's headstone. In the end we made an inside walk of the collection, for the old cellar had a dirt floor and was not always dry, but we laid them face down. When we had raked and swept, and brushed and put back the articles accepted by the board, and all was trim and neat, Westbury looked in.
"Looks nice," he said, and added, "that's what you've got now, but by and by you'll have your mess of old truck, too, and the next man will cart a lot of it to the wood-pile, just as you're carting it now."
I said I thought we would begin our career with a coat of whitewash. Westbury noticed something sticking out from an overhead beam, and drew out a long-handled wrought-iron toasting-fork. Looking and prying about, we discovered an old pair of brass snuffers, and a pair of hand-made wrought-iron shears. The old things were pretty rusty, and I could see that Westbury did not value them highly, but I would not have traded them for the pork-barrel and the ham-barrel and all the other barrels and benches reserved from Uncle Joe's collection. 'Lias Mullins, inspecting them, became reflective:
"Them's from away back in old Ben Meeker's time," he said, "or mebbe furder than that. The' ain't been no scissors made by hand in this country since my time, an' a good while before. I guess old Ben was a good hand to have things made. I've heard my father tell that when he was a boy Cap'n Ben, as they called him, one day found his door-sill split, an' went to the blacksmith shop an' had one made out of iron. Father said it was a big curiosity, and everybody went to look at it. That would be fully a hundred years ago, when the' wasn't so much to talk about. He said that the biggest piece of news in Brook Ridge for a good while was that Cap'n Ben had an iron door-sill. It was around there at the side door. I've seen it many a time, an' for all I know it's there yet."