It was when I began to go to the district school that I first heard of Ferman Henry and his house. Just after we had through the little stream that ran across the road, we came in full sight of the place. The house stood about half-way up the hill that rose gently from the little , and in front of it was a large oak-tree that spread its branches out over the porch and almost to the road. There were alder-bushes and burdocks along the fence,—or, rather, where the fence was meant to be; for when I first knew the place almost half of it was gone, and the remaining half was never in repair. On one side of the house was a well, and in this was a wooden pump. We used often to stop here to get a drink,—for there never yet was a boy that could pass by water without stopping for a drink. I remember that the pump always had to be primed, the 233valves were so old and worn; and when we poured water in at the top to start it, we had to work the handle very hard and fast, until we got quite red in the face, before the water came, and then we had to keep the handle going, for if we stopped a single moment the water would run down again and leave the pump quite dry. I never knew the time when the pump was in repair, and I do not know why it was that we boys spent our breath in priming it and getting water from the well. Perhaps it was because we had always heard that the water was so very cold; and perhaps, too, because we liked to stop a moment at the house,—for Ferman Henry and his family were the “cleverest” people we knew. City people may not know that in Farmington we used the word “clever” to mean kind or obliging,—as when we of a boy who would give us a part of his apple, or a neighbor who would lend us his tools or do an errand for us when he went to town.  
I had always been told that Ferman Henry was a very shiftless man. The neighbors knew that he would leave his buggy or his harness out of doors under the apple-trees all summer long, 234exposed to sun and rain; and that he did not like to work. Our people thought that everyone should not only work, but also like to work simply for the pleasure it brought. I recall that our copy-books and readers said something of this sort when I went to school; and I know that the people of Farmington believed, or thought they believed, that this was true.
 
Ferman Henry was a carpenter, and a good one, everybody said, although it was not easy to get him to undertake a job of work; and if he began to build something, he would never finish it, but leave it for someone else when it was partly done. He was a large, fat man, and when I first knew him he wore a colored shirt, and trousers made of blue drilling with wide suspenders passing over his great shoulders; sometimes one of these was broken, and he often fastened the end to his trousers with a nail that slipped through a hole in the suspender and in the cloth, where a button was torn off. He often wore cowhide boots, with his trousers legs sometimes inside and sometimes outside; but generally he was barefoot when we went past the house. I do not remember 235seeing him in winter-time, perhaps because then he was not out of doors under the big oak-tree. At any rate, my memory pictures him only as I have described him.
 
When I first heard of Ferman Henry, I was told about his house. This was begun before the war, and he was building it himself. He began it so that he might be busy when he had no other work to do; and then too his family was always getting larger, and he needed a new home. He had worked occasionally upon the house for six or seven years, and then he went out as a soldier with the three-months’ men. This absence hindered him seriously with his work; but before he went away he managed to inclose enough of the house so that he was able to move his family in, intending to finish the building as soon as he got back.
 
The house was not a large affair,—an upright part with three rooms above and three below, and a one-story kitchen in the shape of an L running from the side. But it was really to be a good house, for Ferman Henry was a good carpenter and was building it for a home.
 
After he got back from the war he would 236take little jobs of work from the neighbors now and then, but still tinkered at his house. When any work of special importance or profit came along, he refused it, saying he must first “finish up” his house.
 
I can just remember the building as it appeared when I commenced going to the district school. The clapboards had begun to brown with age and wind and rain. The front room was done, excepting as to paint. The back room below and the rooms upstairs were still unfinished, and the L was little more than a skeleton waiting for its bones to be covered up. The front doors and windows had been put in, but the side and back windows were boarded up, and no had appeared. Back of the house was a little barn with a hen-house on one side, and on the other was a pen full of pigs, drinking , growing fat, climbing into the trough, and running their long snouts up through the pen to see what we children had brought for them to eat.
 
I remember Ferman Henry from the time when I first began to go to school. He was fat and “clever,” and always ready to talk with any of the boys; and he would tell us to come 237into the yard and take the dipper and prime the pump, whenever we stopped to get a drink. He generally sat outside, under the big oak-tree, on the bench that stood by the fence, where he could see all who passed his door.
 
Mrs. Henry was almost as large and fat as he, and she too ............