The house of this dear woman burned, not long after she and her husband died, and only the blossoming lilacs mark its empty cellar-hole, but the next farm, which belonged to Mr. Eastman’s brother, and is now his nephew’s, is a fine one. You drive on to a wide green, as smoothly kept as a lawn, where three huge trees, a willow and two elms, overhang the house. There are big comfortable barns and outhouses, a corn-crib and well-sweep, and the house is square and ample, with two big chimneys.
Next to the Eastmans’, beyond their orchard, comes a neat small farm, with a long wide stone wall, where grapes are trained, owned once by two queer old sisters, the Misses Pushard, or as we have it, the Miss Pushhards. (A Huguenot name, pronounced _Pushaw_ by the older generation.) They went to Lyceum in their young days, and, a rare thing then so far in the country, they had a piano. This gave them “a great shape.” Poor ladies, with their piano! Years later they were in straitened circumstances, and anxious to sell it, but to their indignation nobody wanted it, or not at the price they thought fitting; so, one night, they _chopped it up_, and hid the pieces. Thus they were not left with the instrument on their hands; and they had not accepted an unworthy price for their treasure. All this was learned years afterwards from some old papers. The fragments of the piano were found in the cistern.
The last farm on the road is owned by Sam Marston and his dear wife, Susan; who, though you never would think it (except for a little remaining crispness of speech), was born in England, in Essex, and came as a young English housemaid—dear me, how long ago now!—to the Homestead, eight miles away, by the River. Sam Marston worked there in the stables, and lost his heart promptly, and after four or five years of characteristic Yankee courting, leisurely, but humorously determined, Susan made up her mind, and said “yes,” and came out to the farm, with her fresh print gowns, her trimness and stanchness, and her abiding religion.
Susan keeps also her fixed ideas of the “quality.” She is now a power in her whole neighborhood. She and Sam, alas, have no children, a great sorrow, but the young people growing up near her show the reflection of her uprightness and that of her Sam. But after all these years she is still an exotic. The Sunday-school which she has gathered about her is strictly Church of England. The children learn their catechism, and “to do their duty in life in that station into which it shall please God to call them”; and they are instructed perfectly clearly as to their betters!