CHAPTER FIVE
I
But Sarah was biding her time
have not mentioned, I think, a small building that, when we came, stood just across the road from our house—a rather long, low structure with sliding windows, called "the shop." Red raspberries of a large, sweet variety were ripening about it, and within was a short box counter, a shoemaker's work-bench, a cutting-board, a great bag of wooden shoe-pegs, and a quantity of leather scraps, for it had, in fact, been a shop during the two generations preceding our ownership. Before that it appeared to have served as a sort of office for Captain Ben Meeker, who also had been not merely a farmer, as certain records proved. Captain Ben may have built the shop, though I think it was older, for when we examined the picturesque little building, with a view to restoration, it proved to be too far gone—too much a structure of decay. So we tore down "the shop," and, incidentally, Old Pop, who did the tearing, found a Revolutionary bayonet in the loft; also a more recent, and particularly hot, hornets' nest which caused him to leap through the window and spring into the air several times on the way to the bushes by the brook. But that is another story. We have already had the bee history; hornets would be in the nature of a repetition.
We found something of still greater interest in the old shop. One day, digging over the leather scraps, we uncovered the records above mentioned—that is to say, the old account-books of Captain Ben Meeker and the two generations of shoemakers who had followed him. These ancient folios, stoutly made and legibly written, correlate a good deal of Brook Ridge history for a hundred years. The names of the dead are there, and the items of their forgotten activities.