The farm
buildings looked neat and well-cared for. The sixty-acre wood-lot that
stretched from the fields up to the foot of Hedgehog Ledge had been
cleaned and cleared of undergrowth until you could drive a team from end
to end of it, among the three hundred or more immense old sugar maples
and yellow birches.
That wood-lot, indeed, had been the old farmer's special pride. He loved
those big old-growth maples, loved them so well that he would not tap
them in the spring for maple sugar. It shortened the lives of trees, he
said, to tap them, particularly large old trees.
It was therefore distressing to see how, after grandsir Cranston died,
the farm was allowed to run down and go to ruin. His wife had died years
before; they had no children; and the only relatives were a brother and
a nephew in Portland, and a niece in Bangor. Cranston had left no will.
The three heirs could not agree about dividing the property. The case
had gone to court and stayed there for four years.
Meanwhile the farm was rented first to one and then to another tenant,
who cropped the fields, let weeds, briers, and bushes grow, neglected
the buildings and opened unsightly gaps in the hitherto tidy stone
walls.
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