As compensation for my services as mail-carrier, I was paid fifty cents each way, up one day and back the next—twice a week. And I was glad to get that. Our mail-carriers here in Wetmore, covering about equal distance, with only two hours on the road, draw about seven dollars a day.
When Willis Coburn offered me the job I was short of the required age, sixteen, and I was wondering how I would get by without swearing to a lie, when our good old postmaster, Alvin McCreery, solved the problem for me. When he swore me in, he said, “Now, don’t tell me your age.” He shook his head, negatively, and repeated, “Don’t tell me your age.”
At the Radford home in Seneca, I learned enough about the old Colony to make a book, but much of it is now shrouded in a fog of haze. On the occasion of our first trip, Mr. Radford and Mr. Coburn discussed Colony matters freely in my presence. It was July, and it was out on the border of the big orchard which came right up to the back door, under the shade of an early harvest apple tree, where they sat and talked.
I have to admit that at the time I was more interested in the golden fruit hanging on the apple tree than I was in the conversation, but I got enough of it to know that there would be a good story in it, if I could but remember more clearly. Mr. Radford’s agile mind ground out astonishing facts as steadily as a grist mill that afternoon. Whatever else may be said of John Radford, he was an educated man. And he had a wonderful sense of humor.
As I remember it, or partly remember it, the high light of the afternoon’s conversation—the thing that tickled the men most—was a racy romance that had budded, bloomed, and died at Llewellyn Castle. The male participants were of course Wetmore men—one artisan, one professional. But somewhere along the time-worn trail between that old apple tree and my present quarters, separated by three and fifty years, the details of that affair are lost. And like the characters who made it, that romance has crumbled into dust—is now a part of the past.
But the phantom of the bally old thing, elusive though as a half-formed thought awakened by a stray wisp of forgotten fragrance, still hovers over section twenty-five. And if memory were but a trifle more elastic I could entertain you with something more than the tattered shreds of Llewellyn Castle’s most charming romance—a jolly old love-spree staged and destroyed by the heartless hand of Fate.