CHAPTER XIII.
FOX PILLS ABOUT this time an affair which had long been worrying Addison and myself came to a final settlement.
Up in the great woods, three or four miles from the old Squire's farm, there was a clearing of thirty or forty acres in which stood an old house and barn, long unoccupied.

A lonelier place can hardly be imagined.

Sombre spruce and fir woods inclosed the clearing on all sides; and over the tree-tops on the east side loomed the three rugged dark peaks of the Stoss Pond mountains.
Thirty years before, Lumen Bartlett, a young man about twenty years old, had cleared the land with his own labor, built the house and barn, and a little later gone to live there with his wife, Althea, who was younger even than he.
Life in so remote a place must have been somewhat solitary; but they were very happy, it is said, for a year and a half.

Then one morning they fell to quarreling bitterly over so trifling a thing as a cedar broom.

In the anger of the moment Althea made a bundle of her clothing and without a word of farewell set off on foot to go home to her parents, who lived ten miles away.
Lumen, equally stubborn, took his axe and went out to his work of clearing land for a new field.