The shadows were long when I got to Canterbury. At the head of its main street I looked down upon a village green and some fine old elms. It was a singularly quiet place. I stopped in front of a big white meeting house. An old man was mowing in its graveyard near the highway. Slowly he swung his scythe.
"It's a fine day," I said.
"No, it ain't, nuther-too much hard work in it," said he.
"Do you know where Kate Fullerton lives?" I asked.
"Well, it's purty likely that I do," he answered as he stood resting on his snath. "I've lived seventy-two years on this hill come the fourteenth day o' June, an' if I didn't know where she lived I'd be 'shamed of it."
He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and added:
"I know everybody that lives here an' everybody that dies here, an' some that orto be livin' but ain't an' some that orto be dead which ye couldn't kill `em with an ax—don't seem so—I declare it don't. Do ye see that big house down there in the trees?"
I could see the place at which he pointed far back from the village street in the valley below us, the house nearly hidden by tall evergreens.
"Yes," I answered.
"No ye can't, nuther—leastways if ye can ye've got better eyes'n mos' people, ye can't see only a patch o' the roof an' one chimney—them pine trees bein' thicker'n the hair on a dog. It's the gloomiest ol' house in all creation, I guess. Wal, that's the Squire Fullerton place—he's Kate's father."