There were other houses in Ogleport which would gladly have opened their doors to such a boarder as George Brayton, but he was wise for so young a man, and most of them contained only too many of the things classed as “comforts of a home”—even sons and grown-up daughters.
So he took Mrs. Dryer’s advice and decided to sojourn with the Widow Wood.
Fat and active and fussy was the widow, bearing her three-score years lightly enough, though with a dim idea that she was the oldest inhabitant of Ogleport, and, by good rights, the most important person in the village.
Old Judge Wood had been a great man in his day, at least in his own estimation.
He had meant to found a fortune and a family, but had somehow failed to do either.
He had, however, built the biggest and costliest house in all that region of country, and then had died before he had put the second coat of paint on it.
He left his widow so nearly just enough to squeeze along on, that she had never seen her way clearly to that second coat of paint, or indeed, to any other sort of finishing up, and the great roomy mansion had held up its bare, square nakedness of weather-beaten pine, on the gentle slope towards the little river, for a quarter of a century.
Even the trees refused to keep very close company with such a curious embodiment of ancient respectability, and all the winds of heaven, as well as all the hot summer suns, had the fairest kind of a chance at it.
Still, the Wood mansion was by all odds the best boarding house in Ogleport, for its lady-owner was a notable housekeeper, and had a special pride in the character of her guests.
“Haunted!” said George Brayton to himself, when he had finished unpacking his books in the big, second-floor front room, of which the widow made him temporary lord. “Haunted! It looks very much like it. But I don’t wonder the ghosts keep out of it in summer. There’s a perfect glare of light in it, from one end to the other. She doesn’t seem to suspect what the blinds were made for.”