"No, indeed!" the girl replied, laughing, and, rubbing a place on the back of her left hand, she showed us that her skin was white under the walnut stain. "I'm from Albany. I live with my mother there, and I'm sending my brother to the Troy Polytechnic School."
"Well, did you ever!" Willis said again as, now completely disillusioned, we left the tent.
CHAPTER XXVI
UNCLE SOLON CHASE COMES ALONG
There was what the farmers and indeed the whole country deemed "hard times" that fall, and the "hard times" grew harder. Again we young folks had been obliged to put off attending school at the village Academy—much to the disappointment of Addison and Theodora.
Money was scarce, and all business ventures seemed to turn out badly. Everything appeared to be going wrong, or at least people imagined so. Uncle Solon Chase from Chase's Mills—afterward the Greenback candidate for the Presidency—was driving about the country with his famous steers and rack-cart, haranguing the farmers and advocating unlimited greenback money.
To add to our other troubles at the old Squire's that fall, our twelve Jersey cows began giving bitter milk, so bitter that the cream was affected and the butter rendered unusable. Yet the pasture was an excellent one, consisting of sweet uplands, fringed round with sugar-maples, oaks and beeches, where the cleared land extended up the hillsides into the borders of the great woods.
For some time we were wholly at a loss to know what caused all those cows to give bitter milk.
A strange freak also manifested itself in our other herd that summer; first one of our Black Dutch belted heifers, and then several others took to gnawing the bark from young trees in their pasture and along the lanes to the barn. Before we noticed what they were doing, the bark from twenty or more young maples, elms and other trees had been gnawed and stripped off as high as the heifers could reach. It was not from lack of food; there was grass enough in the pasture, and provender and hay at the barn; but an abnormal appetite had beset them; they would even pull off the tough bark of cedars, in the swamp by the brook, and stand for hours, trying to masticate long, stringy strips of it.