"And that's all due to me!" Halstead used to exclaim once in a while. "If I hadn't burnt up that old churn, we would be tugging away at it to this day!"
"Yes, Halse, you are a wonderful boy in the kitchen!" Ellen would remark roguishly.
CHAPTER VII
BEAR-TONE
One day about the first of February, Catherine Edwards made the rounds of the neighborhood with a subscription paper to get singers for a singing school. A veteran "singing master"—Seth Clark, well known throughout the country—had offered to give the young people of the place a course of twelve evening lessons or sessions in vocal music, at four dollars per evening; and Catherine was endeavoring to raise the sum of forty-eight dollars for this purpose.
Master Clark was to meet us at the district schoolhouse for song sessions of two hours, twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday evenings at seven o'clock. Among us at the old Squire's we signed eight dollars.
The singing school did not much interest me personally, for the reason that I did not expect to attend. As the Frenchman said when invited to join a fox hunt, I had been. Two winters previously there had been a singing school in an adjoining school district, known as "Bagdad," where along with others I had presented myself as a candidate for vocal culture, and had been rejected on the grounds that I lacked both "time" and "ear." What was even less to my credit, I had been censured as being concerned in a disturbance outside the schoolhouse. That was my first winter in Maine, and the teacher at that singing school was not Seth Clark, but an itinerant singing master widely known as "Bear-Tone."
As opportunities for musical instruction thereabouts were limited, the old Squire, who loved music and who was himself a fair singer, had advised us to go. Five of us, together with our two young neighbors, Kate and Thomas Edwards, drove over to Bagdad in a three-seated pung sleigh.
The old schoolhouse was crowded with young people when we arrived, and a babel of voices burst on us as we drew rein at the door. After helping the girls from the pung, Addison and I put up the horses at a farmer's barn near by. When we again reached the schoolhouse, a gigantic man in an immense, shaggy buffalo coat was just coming up. He entered the building a step behind us.