In the
bar-room was a fat old countryman on a journey, and a quack doctor of the
vicinity, and an Englishman with a peculiar accent. Seeing B------'s
jointed and brass-mounted fishing-pole, he took it for a theodolite, and
supposed that we had been on a surveying expedition. At supper, which
consisted of bread, butter, cheese, cake, doughnuts, and gooseberry-pie,
we were waited upon by a tall, very tall woman, young and maiden-looking,
yet with a strongly outlined and determined face. Afterwards we found
her to be the wife of mine host. She poured out our tea, came in when we
rang the table-bell to refill our cups, and again retired. While at
supper, the fat old traveller was ushered through the room into a
contiguous bedroom. My own chamber, apparently the best in the house,
had its walls ornamented with a small, gilt-framed, foot-square
looking-glass, with a hairbrush hanging beneath it; a record of the
deaths of the family written on a black tomb, in an engraving, where a
father, mother, and child were represented in a graveyard, weeping over
said tomb; the mourners dressed in black, country-cut clothes; the
engraving executed in Vermont.
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