Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories

MP3 Audio CD. Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories


OLDTOWN FIRESIDE STORIES


THE GHOST IN THE MILL.


OME, Sam, tell us a story,” said I, as Hariet and I crept to his knees,
in the glow of the bright evening firelight; while Aunt Lois was
busily rattling the tea-things, and grandmamma, at the other end of the
fireplace, was quietly setting the heel of a blue-mixed yarn stocking.

In those days we had no magazines and daily papers, each reeling off
a serial story. Once a week, “The Columbian Sentinel” came from Boston
with its slender stock of news and editorial; but all the multiform
devices--pictorial, narrative, and poetical--which keep the mind of
the present generation ablaze with excitement, had not then even an
existence. There was no theatre, no opera; there were in Oldtown no
parties or balls, except, perhaps, the annual election, or Thanksgiving
festival; and when winter came, and the sun went down at half-past four
o'clock, and left the long, dark hours of evening to be provided
for, the necessity of amusement became urgent. Hence, in those days,
chimney-corner story-telling became an art and an accomplishment.
Society then was full of traditions and narratives which had all the
uncertain glow and shifting mystery of the firelit hearth upon them.
They were told to sympathetic audiences, by the rising and falling light
of the solemn embers, with the hearth-crickets filling up every pause.