This remark gave Hiram an opportunity which he was not slow in improving.
“I heerd as how there was another feller in town who tried to get Huldy to marry him and throw poor 'Zeke over.”
Mr. Strout puckered up his mouth and there was a strained look on his face which indicated that the shot had gone home. But his verbal ammunition was not all expended.
“You can tell me what you've a mind to, but I know that he tried mighty hard to get Lindy Putnam to marry him, an' I don't imagine he'd have taken up with a blind girl if he hadn't heard that Heppy Putnam was going to leave her all her money. I had him looked up by some friends of mine in the city. They said he didn't have much himself, but his father paid his bills. His father jest gave him to understand that if he didn't marry the right girl, with plenty of dough, he wouldn't get much from him.”
“Wall, you may be right and you may be wrong, Obadiah. But when a man's dead I don't think it does you any good to roast him and pick his bones. It's too much like those cannibiles that crazy feller told us about. Quincy Adams Sawyer was always a good friend to me, and a better one to you, Strout, than you deserved, judgin' from the way you've been talkin'. His money has been the makin' of both on us, and while we do business together I hope we'll let Mr. Sawyer, as the church folks say, rest in pieces.”
CHAPTER XIX. — BOYHOOD TO MANHOOD
Until he was fourteen years of age, young Quincy attended the public schools in Fernborough and Cottonton. While in England he had had a governess and later a tutor, so that when he reached America he was much farther advanced than Fernborough boys of his own age. Methods in the New England town were different, however, and his Uncle Ezekiel was satisfied to have him keep pace with the others, and not arouse antagonism by asking for any special promotion.
Ezekiel's son Quincy had decided to become a farmer, following in his father's footsteps. But scientific farming was supplanting old methods, and he had taken the course at the Agricultural College and received his diploma.