A lonelier place can hardly be
imagined. Sombre spruce and fir woods inclosed the clearing on all
sides; and over the tree-tops on the east side loomed the three rugged
dark peaks of the Stoss Pond mountains.
Thirty years before, Lumen Bartlett, a young man about twenty years old,
had cleared the land with his own labor, built the house and barn, and a
little later gone to live there with his wife, Althea, who was younger
even than he.
Life in so remote a place must have been somewhat solitary; but they
were very happy, it is said, for a year and a half. Then one morning
they fell to quarreling bitterly over so trifling a thing as a cedar
broom. In the anger of the moment Althea made a bundle of her clothing
and without a word of farewell set off on foot to go home to her
parents, who lived ten miles away.
Lumen, equally stubborn, took his axe and went out to his work of
clearing land for a new field. No one saw him alive afterwards; but two
weeks later some hunters found his body in the woods. Apparently the
tops of several of the trees he had been trying to cut down had lodged
together, and to bring them down he had cut another large tree on which
they hung.
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