What people may have been there that afterward came to tower aloft, and some of them to move the world! Samuel Occum may have been there, the Indian who moved London; Brant may have been there, whose name became a terror in the Connecticut Colony in the Wyoming Valley, and whom the poet Campbell falsely associates with the tragedies of Wyoming.
The old church stood by the green; it stands there now. In it Governor Trumbull’s stately proclamations were read; there probably the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed.
Thanksgiving—what stories like Christmas tales of to-day used to be told by long log fires after the church and the dinner, which latter exhibited all the products of the fields and woods! A favorite story concerned people who were frightened by ghosts that were not ghosts.
Let us give one of these stories that pictures the heart and superstition of old New England and also one of Connecticut’s handicrafts. For the clock-cleaner was a notable story-teller in those old days. He cleaned family clocks and oiled them, sometimes with walnut oil. He usually remained overnight at a farmhouse or inn, and related stories of clocks wherever he found a clock to clean.
These Connecticut clock stories in Brother Jonathan’s day were peculiar, for clocks were supposed to be family oracles—to stop to give warning of danger, and to stop, as arrested by an invisible hand, on the approach of death.
Curious people would gather at the war office when the wandering clock-cleaner appeared upon the green. The time-regulator was sure to tell stories at the Alden Tavern or at the war office, and usually at the latter. Men with spurs would sit along the counter, and dig their spurs into the wood, under excitement, as the clock tale was unfolded: how that the family clock stopped and the Nestor of the family died, and the oldest son went out and told the bees in their straw hives.
Peter the outcast had an ear for these many tales while about his work, and Dennis O’Hay was often found on the top of a barrel at these gatherings.
Dennis heard these New England tales with increasing terror. There were supposed to be fairies in the land from which he came—fairy shoemakers, who brought good to people and eluded their hand-grasp. He became so filled with the “signs” and superstitions of the people that once, when he met a white rabbit, he thought it was a rabbit turned into a ghost, and he ran back from the woods to the tavern to ask what the “sign” meant, when one saw the ghost of “bunny.” A nimble little rabbit once turned its white cotton-like tail to him, and darted into a burrow. He ran home to ask what meant the sign, and the good taverner said that was a sign that he had lost the rabbit, which was usually the case when a white tail so vanished from sight.
There was one story of the clock that was associated with early revolutionary days that pictures the times as well as superstitions vividly, and we will tell it and place it in the war office on a long evening when the Governor was busy with his council in the back room.
The clock-cleaner has come, the farmers sit on boxes and barrels, some “cavalry” men hang over the “counter,” and swing their feet and spurs. The candles sputter and the light is dim, and the Connecticut clock-cleaner, amid increasing stillness and darkness, relates his tale slowly, which was like this: