And has gone to the d——l beyond dispute.’”
I was able to respond in kind, for I happened to remember about another local poet, who hated a surviving son of this rural vampire, who quite worthily perpetuated the detestable qualities of his defunct parent, and, when he died, as he did not many years after his father, the other local poet, not to be outdone by my grandfather, composed the following verse as a fitting epitaph:
“Here lies the body of Podges Ed,
We all rejoice to know he’s dead;
Too bad for Heaven, too mean for Hell,
And where he’s gone no one can tell.”
In the “Old Times” there were strong, honest, rugged characters among the Vermont hills. The majority of them were men of plain speech and unyielding contempt for meanness in any form. A goodly number of the early settlers in the eastern counties were soldiers of the Revolution who had emigrated to the new State soon after its close, and they brought with them the simple, manly habits and ways of thinking which are characteristic of service in the field. Many were the anecdotes told of them that day—the day of the accident to the oats—very much to the edification of the juniors, who were all eyes and ears, at least for that occasion.
The old house at the “crotch of the roads,” when I was a boy, was the Saturday and Sunday halting-place for the old soldiers of my own and several of the neighboring towns. The larder was always well-supplied, and the barrels of cider that lined a capacious cellar were ready to respond to every call. Under the influence of an abundant supply of that exhilarating beverage, the fighting over of old battles was always vigorous and sometimes vividly realistic.
The most famous of the local veterans, of my time, was known among his neighbors as “Uncle Daniel V——.” He was a Lexington-Bunker Hill man, who had served till the end of the war. As I remember him, he was a most interesting character, humorous, with a good memory, a famous drinker of hard cider, and a notable singer of the patriotic soldier songs of the “Seventy-six” period. I can recall, in his showing “how the Yankee boys flaxed the Britishers,” how he would shoulder one of his canes—he was a rheumatic and walked with two—and march up and down the broad kitchen of the old house, going through the motions of loading, aiming and firing at an imaginary enemy, greatly to my childish delight, for those were the first fierce war’s alarms I had ever witnessed, and I can never forget how my imagination was fired; nor how ardently I wished I had been at Lexington and Bunker Hill, where “we gave it to the Red Coats.” Uncle Daniel was far too good a patriot to say anything about the return compliments, “How the Red Coats gave it to us,” upon one of those historic fields. Since his day I have learned that one of his glorification songs, which professed to give a correct account of one particular Yankee victory, was not in strict accord with the truths of history. I could recall for my host but a single verse of all the songs he used to sing, and it savors so much of the camp that I had some misgivings about repeating it before Christians, but upon being hard pressed by the boys and seeing approving glances from other directions, concluded to go ahead.
The verse I remember is one from a song supposed to have been sung by British soldiers who were in the retreat after the defeat at Concord, April 19, 1775, and runs thus: