The house where Levin Dennis now looked out was a three-roomed, frame, double cabin, with beds in every room but the kitchen, and the hip-roof gave considerable bed accommodation in the attic besides, the rooms being all small, as was general in that day. Around the house extended a pretty garden, with some cherry and plum trees and wild peach along its boundaries, and the fields around contained many stumps, showing that the clearing had been made not many years before, while here and there some heaps of brush had been allowed to accumulate instead of being burned.
As Levin looked at one of those brush-heaps in a low place, a pair of buzzards slowly and clumsily circled up from it, and, flying low, went round and round as if they might be rearing their young there and hated to go far; and, for long afterwards, Levin saw them hovering high above the spot in parental mindfulness.
He drew his head in the dormer casement, and was making ready to go down to the breakfast he smelled cooking below, when his own name was pronounced in the garden, and he stopped and listened.
"You lie!" exclaimed the old woman's voice. "I'll mash you to the ground!"
"He said so, grandma, indeed he did."
Levin had a peep from the depths of the garret, and he saw that Mrs. Cannon was standing with the hoe she had been using raised over Hulda's head, while a demoniac expression of rage distorted her not unpleasing features.
Levin walked at once to the window and whistled, as if to the bird in the tree. The older woman immediately dropped her hoe, and cried out to Levin:
"Heigh, son! ain't you most a-starved fur yer breakfast? It's all ready fur ye, an' Huldy's waitin' fur ye to come down."
Levin at once went down the short, winding stairs to a table spread in the kitchen end, and the old woman blew a tin horn towards Johnson's Cross-roads, as if summoning other boarders, and then she said to Levin, with a very pleasing countenance:
"Son, these yer no-count people will be askin' you questions to bother you, and I don't want no harm to come to you, Levin; so you tell everybody you see yer that Levin Cannon is your name, and they'll think you's juss one o' my people, and won't ask you no more."