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.
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