The Duke of Stockbridge | Page 5

women kissing their men. The air
was electric.
"Yes," she said, and gave him her red lips, and for a moment it seemed
as if the earth had gone from under his feet. The next thing he knew he
was standing in line, with Reub on one side, and George Fennell on the
other and Abner Rathbun's six feet three towering at one end of the line,
while Parson West was standing on the piazza of the store, praying for
the blessing of God on the expedition.
"Amen," the parson said, and Captain Woodbridge's voice rang out
again. The lines faced to the right, filed off the green at quick step,
turned into the Pittsfield road, and left the women to their tears.

CHAPTER SECOND
NINE YEARS AFTER
Early one evening in the very last of August, 1786, only three years
after the close of the Revolutionary war, a dozen or twenty men and
boys, farmers and laborers, are gathered, according to custom, in the
big barroom of Stockbridge tavern. The great open fireplace of course
shows no cheery blaze of logs at this season, and the only light is the
dim and yellow illumination diffused by two or three homemade tallow
candles stuck about the bar, which runs along half of one side of the
apartment. The dim glimmer of some pewter mugs standing on a shelf
behind the bar is the only spot of reflected light in the room, whose
time-stained, unpainted woodwork, dingy plastering, and low ceiling,
thrown into shadows by the rude and massive crossbeams, seems
capable of swallowing up without a sign ten times the illumination
actually provided. The faces of four or five men, standing near the bar,
or lounging on it, are quite plainly visible, and the forms of half a

dozen more who are seated on a long settle placed against the opposite
wall, are more dimly to be seen, while in the back part of the room,
leaning against the posts or walls, or lounging in the open doorway, a
dozen or more figures loom indistinctly out of the darkness.
The tavern, it must be remembered, as a convivial resort, is the social
antipodes of the back room of Squire Edwards' "store." If you would
consort with silk-stockinged, wigged, and silver shoe-buckled
gentlemen, you must just step over there, for at the tavern are only to be
found the hewers of wood and drawers of water, mechanics,
farm-laborers, and farmers. Ezra Phelps and Israel Goodrich, the
former the owner of the new gristmill at "Mill Hollow," a mile west of
the village, the other a substantial farmer, with their corduroy coats and
knee-breeches, blue woolen hose and steel shoe buckles, are the most
socially considerable and respectably attired persons present.
Perhaps about half the men and boys are barefooted, according to the
economical custom of a time when shoes in summer are regarded as
luxuries not necessities. The costume of most is limited to shirt and
trousers, the material for which their own hands or those of their
women-folk have sheared, spun, woven and dyed. Some of the better
dressed wear trousers of blue and white striped stuff, of the kind
now-a-days exclusively used for bed-ticking. The leathern breeches
which a few years before were universal are still worn by a few in spite
of their discomfort in summer.
Behind the bar sits Widow Bingham, the landlady, a buxom,
middle-aged woman, whose sharp black eyes have lost none of their
snap, whether she is entertaining a customer with a little pleasant
gossip, or exploring the murky recesses of the room about the door,
where she well knows sundry old customers are lurking, made cowards
of by consciousness of long unsettled scores upon her slate. And
whenever she looks with special fixity into the darkness there is soon a
scuttling of somebody out of doors.
She pays little or no attention to the conversation of the men around the
bar. Being largely political, it might be expected to have the less
interest for one of the domestic sex, and moreover it is the same old

story she has been obliged to hear over and over every evening, with
little variation, for a year or two past.
For in those days, throughout Massachusetts, at home, at the tavern, in
the field, on the road, in the street, as they rose up, and as they sat down,
men talked of nothing but the hard times, the limited markets, and low
prices for farm produce, the extortions and multiplying numbers of the
lawyers and sheriffs, the oppressions of creditors, the enormous,
grinding taxes, the last sheriff's sale, and who would be sold out next,
the last batch of debtors taken to jail, and who would go next, the utter
dearth of money of any sort, the