“Where are your inseparable comrades?” he asked.
“Oh!” said she. “Jenny Alden isn’t very well, this afternoon, and Miss Jewett has gone over with Mrs. Stevenson to Quopsaug.”
“Quop—what?” asked Gilbert, stopping short.
“Quopsaug,” repeated Mrs. Farrell, simply. “Did you never hear of it?”
“No, I never heard of Quopsaug. Is it—vegetable or mineral?”
“It’s vegetable, I believe. At least it vegetates. It’s a place—a huddle of unpainted wooden houses in a little hollow at the foot of Scatticong, on the east side. It has a Folly and it has a Bazar. But I wonder Quopsaug hasn’t come up long ago in our poverty-stricken conversation. I suppose everyone must have thought everybody else had talked you to death about it.”
“No,” said Gilbert. “What do people go to Quopsaug for?”
“To see the Folly—that’s the storekeeper’s mansion; and to buy things out of the Bazar—that’s his store. And to wheedle the inhabitants generally out of their spinning-wheels; at least that’s what Mrs. Stevenson’s gone for to-day.”
“No; it’s one of those musical Indian names we’re so fond of in New England. The people adopted it thirty or forty years ago, when they started a cotton mill—which failed—there. The place used to be called East Leander, but they rechristened it Quopsaug, after a chief who scalped the first settler, and then became a praying Indian, and lies over there in the Quopsaug graveyard, under a Latin epitaph. You ought to go to Quopsaug.”