High Bradford

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1912 Excerpt: ... ABLOSSOMY path across the fields and through a meadow where the brook was spanned by weatherbeaten logs made a short cut from the Clark farm to an old house that was built by one of the earliest settlers of Bradford. The house was on a knoll, terraced up from the meadows by orchard and kitchen garden, trim flowerbeds and lawns; and if you chose to go home by the white winding road--a dusty walk in summer--overshadowing elms and great silver poplars made the way beautiful. On an evening in April, the easier path was by the longer road, and at five o'clock, precisely, Cap'n Elkanah and his daughter, Mrs. Sears, were taking it. For Cap'n and Mrs. Edward Dillingham were giving a high tea to the other captains and their wives who had made the port of home, and from such a company General Clark was never absent. Especially would he have been missed from any festivity at the Dillingham house, for between him and Madam Desire was a friendship tried in the frost and sun of eighty years. They had learned their letters together in the dame school taught by Miss Peda Dillingham in an upper room of this same old house, where the eaves sloped to mysterious cupboards terrible to naughty children; and before Desire Winslow returned there as the bride of young Kenelm Dillingham and Elkanah had married Mary Seabury, there may have been the first blush of a shy courtship between them. But the two brides were fast friends, and as the years went on the path across the fields was worn by their feet and their children's and their children's children's; and after Kenelm and Mary died, there was the same old friendship between Elkanah and Desire, a friendship sweet with the memory of past joy and sorrow, and shining with such devotion and grace as should challenge the chivalry of y...