He began taking papers from the box, fat rolls of legal documents, letters with their edges worn into tatters and addressed in the crabbed writing of a century ago, title deeds discolored and yellow with age, most of them fastened with great red seals, a mass of musty records that looked dry and dull indeed.
While he was spreading them out upon the table, the door opened quietly and Janet slipped in. She assured them that she had dined and had not got wet, that, except for Mrs. Brown's terrible fever of anxiety lest Cousin Jasper should not be properly cared for, all had gone well. Might she listen, please, and was there going to be another story?
"Not of just the same kind that I have been telling you up yonder on the Windy Hill," replied Tom Brighton, "although here you see the source of all those tales and of a hundred others like them. They are all buried here in these dusty papers, the history of your forbears and of the lands in Medford Valley. It goes all the way back, does the record, to the time when our several times great-grandfather bought the first tract from the Indian, Nashola. I am always glad to think that the red man had enough intelligence and the white man enough honor to make something like a real bargain, that this valley was purchased for what the wild lands were worth instead of being paid for with a gun, a drink of bad spirits, and a handful of beads. See, here is Nashola's name; he learned to write after a fashion, although the Indian witnesses signed only with a mark. And here is the signature of that first one of our kin to settle in the New World, Matthew Hallowell."
"Hallowell?" echoed Oliver. "Did he belong to those same Hallowells in the story, who quarreled over the Huntress?"
"Yes," was the answer, "he was the beginning of a vigorous line, living in and near Medford Valley until there came at last the Hallowell who moved to the seaport town, who built his first ship there and launched into foreign trade. They became great merchants, the Hallowells, in that time between the Revolution and the War of 1812 when Yankee ships and Yankee owners were lords of the high seas. But fortune failed after the death of Reuben Hallowell; his son Alan loved sailing rather than trading and his daughter Cicely married a junior partner in a lesser firm, Howard Brighton, who thought it better for his sons and daughter to go to live on the lands in Medford Valley that had belonged to their mother and had been given by her to him. Cicely's children were Ralph and Felix and Barbara Brighton, of all of whom you have heard."
"How have they heard, Tom?" asked Cousin Jasper, and the Beeman smiled.
"I have been filling up their minds with family history, for I knew that they must understand about this whole affair some day and it would take too long to tell them all the facts at once. So we have come now to the latest portion of the story," he went on, turning again to the younger members of his audience, "to a period when three cousins, Jasper Peyton, Anthony Crawford, and Tom Brighton used to spend much time together when they were growing up.
"Jasper and I are first cousins, since my father was Ralph Brighton and his mother was that younger sister, Barbara. I have had no reluctance in telling you of that bitter mistake my father made and the quarrel with his brother, for he spoke of it often himself and said that, in all his life, he never learned a more valuable lesson. Felix did not marry, since his zeal for the orchard and the bees and later for farming on a larger and larger scale seemed to occupy his every thought. It was he who reclaimed the marshy, waste ground in the valley, 'for,' he said, 'it is wrong that we on the seaboard leave our home acres and move farther and farther westward, looking for new land that is easy to till. It is a wasteful policy, even for a new country.' That was one of the things he had learned on his long journey across the West and back again."
"But I do not understand about Anthony Crawford," put in Oliver. "I haven't seen yet where he comes in at all."
"He calls us cousin, but it is a distant kinship, since he is grandson of that Martin Hallowell who broke with his partner Reuben over the matter of the Huntress. He used to come often to stay in Medford Valley, for he had been left without parents and Felix Brighton was his guardian. My Aunt Barbara, Jasper's mother, had lost her husband early, and she went to live with her brother Felix in the yellow stone farmhouse that had come to him from some earlier Hallowell who had built it a hundred years ago. How we loved the place and how happy we all were there, for I spent almost as much time under that wide, friendly roof as did Anthony. How patient and good Jasper's mother was to three mischievous, active boys, and how unceasingly, wisely kind was Felix Brighton! He has done much for us, Jasper and me, and he would, if he could, have made a man of Anthony.