NEW ENGLAND KITCHEN.
The Marlowes were made welcome here, and used to take their suppers in the kitchen, after becoming foot-weary. When the supper was over, they would linger among the New England people, who daily gathered here, and relate colonial wonder-tales.
One of these tales well fitted the unique room. It was told by Mr. Marlowe, and we give it here:—
THE OLD COACH DOG, OR, THE PHANTOM INN.
The scene to which we introduce the reader on this Thanksgiving Eve was in the old Winslow house at Green Harbor, now Marshfield, Mass. No house in America, we may safely say, ever had so many colonial legends of Thanksgiving Day as this.
“Silas,” said I, one night to an old stage-driver, “tell us the story of the dog that said ‘Silas!’”
The company eagerly demanded the tale.
It was a strange room. In one corner were bushel baskets heaped with corn. Uncle Silas shelled corn, as he said, “for company,” on other than holiday or Sunday evenings.
Over the corn baskets were strings of dried apples, pumpkins, and red peppers. Near the fireplace were rennets of cheese, and under the rafters were candle-poles.
The fireplace revealed great fore-sticks, apple-tree wood, which made an especially hot fire, and was used on Thanksgiving Eves, and at special times.
Apples in rows were toasting on the hot hearth.
The family consisted of an old couple, named White, and their sons and sons’ wives and children from towns near Boston, and a few invited guests.
Uncle Silas caught up his chair and lifted it in the jumping way of the old colonial time to a place nearer the fire. A shutter banged, and he cast his eyes mysteriously toward the window. The room grew very still.
“The clouds are scudding over the moon,” he began,—and I will tell the tale as he told it, as nearly as I remember,—“the wind is rising—I can hear it in the tops of the trees. Many’s the time I have gone down in the old stage-coach on nights like this, and leaped from the seat and snatched the mail-bag from the boot, and when I said ‘Silas,’ there would creep out of the boot that old coach dog.
“That dog was given to me by a sailor, who was about to go to sea from the old North River. He was a pup then.
“I never knew a dog that seemed to think so much of his master as that dog did of me. His eyes were never off of me.
“I taught him a number of tricks, such as to stand up on his hind legs and beg, which he did by uttering a sharp, pitiful cry. While begging one day, he made a sound like ‘Silas.’ I repeated it, and he uttered it again.
“After that I would hold back from him his food until he had made that sound. ‘Say Silas,’ I would say, and after a time he would utter the word, or what sounded like it.
“The old stage-coaches had great leather boots that covered the driver’s legs, and in cold and stormy days could be raised so high as to protect nearly the whole body. Under the boot I carried the mail-bags, and such packages as we to-day send by express.
“The mail-coach was sometimes robbed, when the boot was known to cover valuables. I carried my own money in a large wallet in a side pocket of a great gray coat, and money for others in the same way.
“I drove the stage for ten years, but I was never molested or robbed; and in those ten years my dog Silas always slept at my feet among the mail-bags.
MRS. PRESTON, NEW ENGLAND KITCHEN, MIDWAY.
“While I was driving the stage there was some strange things that happened in the old Dedham woods. Several travellers who had gone through those woods at night had met with strange adventures.
“They had seen a window and a light in a lonely place a little distance from the way, and heard the ringing of a bell like a supper-bell.
“Two of them had turned in toward the window, but as they attempted to approach it, it seemed to draw back into the heart of the woods. After walking toward it for a considerable distance, it seemed to them no nearer, and they had become alarmed, and suddenly turned and fled, believing it to be a ghost.
