A queer old person lived on the Weir’s Mills road when we were children. He had prospered in farming and trade, and was quite a rich man for those parts. He wanted to be richer still, and all his last years he was ridden by two chimerical dreams; one, that a piece of his land was to be bought for a monster hotel, at a fabulous price, and the other that Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried in a small island he owned in the river. He dug and he dug for it. He had absolute faith in the superstition that a fork of green wood—perhaps of witch-hazel only, but I am not sure about this—held firmly in both hands, will point straight to buried water or buried treasure. He has led us all over his island, holding the forked stick.
“There! See him! See him turn!” he would cry out excitedly. “Wild oxen won’t hold him!” The stick certainly turned in his hands, and in ours, when he placed it right for us. I suppose the wood is so elastic and springy that, holding it in a certain way you unconsciously turn it yourself; but it gave a queer feeling.
This whole district is fragrant with the memory of a saint, Mary Scott. She was a cripple her whole life. Her shoulders and the upper part of her body were those of a powerful woman, but her feet and legs were those of a child, and were withered and useless. She lived all alone when I knew her, in a tiny neat house. She spent her days in a child’s cart, which she could move about by the wheels with her hands, and she was most active and busy.
No one could go through a life of such affliction without untellable suffering; but Mary’s sweet faith never seemed to know that she had a self at all, still less a crippled self. She had quick skillful hands, and her absorbing pleasure all through the year was her work for her Christmas tree. She saved, and her neighbors saved for her, every bit of tinfoil and silver or gold paper that could be found, and fashioned out of it bright stars and spangles for trimming. She knitted and knitted, mittens and stockings and comforters, and when the time came near she made candy, and corn-balls, and strung popcorn into garlands. The neighbors all helped her, and good Jacob Damren, at Tresumpscott, always cut her a tree from his woods and set it up for her; and then on Christmas Eve the door of her cottage stood open, and the light streamed out from the bright lighted tree, and the children of the whole district came thronging in with their parents.