“Judge, what ever became of that young lady who kissed him that night at the Richland House?”
“Oh, her? She died a long, long time ago—before you was born. Her folks lost their money on account of the war, and she married a feller that wasn't much account; they moved out to Arkansaw and the marriage turned out bad, and she died when her first baby was born. There ain't none of her family livin' here now—they've purty much all died out too. But they shipped her body back here, and she's buried out in Ellum Grove Cemetery, in the old Machen lot.
“Some of these days, when you are out there in the cemetery foolin' round, with nothin' much else to do, you look for her grave—you kin find it. Bein' a Christian woman, she had a Christian burial and she's restin' in a Christian buryin' ground; but, in strict confidence, I'll tell you this much more while we're on the subject: It wasn't no Christian that privately paid the bill fur the tombstone that marks the place where she's sleepin'. I wonder ef you could figger out who it was that did pay fur it? I'll give you two guesses.
“And say, listen, sonny: your first guess will be the right one.”
CHAPTER X. THE START OF A DREAM
For years it was the dream of our life—I should say our lives, since my wife shared this vision with me—to own an abandoned farm. The idea first came to us through reading articles that appeared in the various magazines and newspapers telling of the sudden growth of what I may call the aban-doned-farm industry.
It seemed that New England in general—and the state of Connecticut in particular—was thickly speckled with delightful old places which, through overcultivation or ill-treatment, had become for the time being sterile and non-productive; so that the original owners had moved away to the nearby manufacturing towns, leaving their ancestral homesteads empty and their ancestral acres idle. As a result there were great numbers of desirable places, any one of which might be had for a song. That was the term most commonly used by the writers of these articles—abandoned farms going for a song. Now, singing is not my forte; still, I made up my mind that if such indeed was the case I would sing a little, accompanying myself on my bank balance, and win me an abandoned farm.
The formula as laid down by the authorities was simple in the extreme: Taking almost any Connecticut town for a starting point, you merely meandered along an elm-lined road until you came to a desirable location, which you purchased for the price of the aforesaid song. This formality being completed, you spent a trivial sum in restoring the fences, and so on, and modernizing the interior of the house; after which it was a comparatively easy task to restore the land to productiveness by processes of intensive agriculture—details procurable from any standard book on the subject or through easy lessons by mail. And so presently, with scarcely any trouble or expense at all, you were the possessor of a delightful country estate upon which to spend your declining years. It made no difference whether you were one of those persons who had never to date declined anything of value; there was no telling when you might start in.