A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

At daybreak on September 26, if I remember aright, we started to drive from the old farm to Portland with eighteen live hogs. There was a crisp frost that morning, so white that till the sun rose you might have thought there had been a slight fall of snow in the night.

We put eight of the largest hogs into one long farm wagon with high sideboards, drawn by a span of Percheron work horses, which I drove; the ten smaller hogs we put into another wagon that Willis Murch drove. By making an early start we hoped to cover forty miles of our journey before sundown, pass the night at a tavern in the town of Gray where the old Squire was acquainted, and reach Portland the next noon. Since we wished to avoid unloading the hogs, we took dry corn and troughs for feeding them in the wagons and buckets for fetching water to them. The old Squire went along with us for the first fifteen miles to see us well on our way, then left us and walked to a railroad station a mile or two off the wagon road, where he took the morning train into Portland, in order to make arrangements for marketing the hogs.

Everything went well during the morning, although the hogs diffused a bad odor along the highway. Toward noon we stopped by the wayside, near the Upper Village of the New Gloucester Shakers, to rest and feed the horses, and to give the hogs water. About one o'clock we went on down the hill to Sabbath Day Pond and into the woods beyond it. The loads were heavy and the horses were plodding on slowly, when, just round a turn of the road in the woods ahead, we heard a deep, awful sound, like nothing that had ever come to our ears before. For an instant I thought it was thunder, it rumbled so portentously: Hough—hough—hough—hough-er-er-er-er-hhh! It reverberated through the woods till it seemed to me that the earth actually trembled.

Willis's horses stopped short. Willis himself rose to his feet, and it seemed to me his cap rose up on his head. Other indistinct sounds also came to our ears from along the road ahead, though nothing was as yet in sight. Then again that awful, prolonged Hough—hough—hough! broke forth.

Close by, lumbermen had been hauling timber from the forest into the highway and had made a distinct trail across the road ditch. While Willis stood up, staring, the horses suddenly whirled half round and bolted for the lumber trail, hogs and all. They did it so abruptly that Willis had no time to control them, and when the wagon went across the ditch, he was pitched off headlong into the brush. Before I could set my feet, my span followed them across the ditch; but I managed to rein them up to a tree trunk, which the wagon tongue struck heavily. There I held them, though they still plunged and snorted in their terror.

Willis's team was running away along the lumber trail, but before it had gone fifty yards we heard a crash, and then a horrible squealing. The wagon had gone over a log or a stump and, upsetting, had spilled all ten hogs into the brushwood.

Willis now jumped to his feet and ran to help me master my team, which was still plunging violently, and I kept it headed to the tree while he got the halters and tied the horses. Just then we heard that terrible Hough—hough! again, nearer now. Looking out toward the road, we saw four teams dragging large, gaudily painted cages that contained animals. The drivers, who wore a kind of red uniform, pulled up and sat looking in our direction, laughing and shouting derisively. That exasperated us so greatly that, checking our first impulse to run in pursuit of the horses and hogs, we rushed to the road to remonstrate.

It was not a full-fledged circus and menagerie, but merely a show on its way from one county fair to another. In one cage there was a boa constrictor, untruthfully advertised to be thirty feet long, which a Fat Lady exhibited at each performance, the monster coiled round her neck. In another cage were six performing monkeys and four educated dogs.

When we saw them that day on the road, the Fat Lady, said to weigh four hundred pounds, was journeying in a double-seated carriage behind the cages. Squeezed on the seat beside her, rode a queer-looking little old man, with a long white beard, whose specialty was to eat glass tumblers, or at least chew them up. He also fought on his hands and knees with one of the dogs. His barking, growling and worrying were so true to life that the spectators could scarcely tell which was the dog and which the man. On the back seat was a gypsy fortune teller and a Wild Man, alleged to hail from the jungles of Borneo and to be so dangerous that two armed keepers had to guard him in order to prevent him from destroying the local population. As we first saw him, divested of his "get-up," he looked tame enough. He was conversing sociably with the gypsy fortune teller.

But for the moment our attention and our indignation were directed mainly at the lion. He was not such a very large lion, but he certainly had a full-sized roar, and the driver of the cage sat and grinned at us.