frightened calves; the plaintive bleating of bewildered lambs; the fierce neighing of excited horses; the yelping of curs; the crowing of imprisoned cocks, responding to each other’s defiant notes; the sing-song clamor of itinerant auctioneers, standing on their wagons and displaying their tempting wares to the little knots around them; the din and hubbub of the busy, moving, talking, jostling multitude,—shouts, laughs, cries, murmurs, all mingled together, till confusion harmonizes; and above all, the constant clanking of the iron handle of the old town-pump, which never ceases all the livelong day. At nightfall the uproar lessens, and as the evening wanes, the unaccustomed sounds diminish, though till midnight, ever and anon, the tired and sleepy citizens are startled from their dreams by whoops, hurrahs, snatches of songs, and outbursts of rude laughter ringing through the frosty air and mingling with the clattering of horses’ feet and the whirring rumble of swift-revolving wheels, as some party of roystering blades, excited by deep potations, drive shouting homewards from the village inns.
Excepting on these unfrequent occasions, Belfield Green is as free from bustle as if it were a hamlet whose name was never seen upon a map. The time has been, however, when it was a busy little mart, the centre of trade for an extensive district. In yonder low-roofed store that stands upon the square, near by the great gambrel-roofed house of which mention has already been made, the second Major Bugbee increased a handsome patrimony till it grew to be a great estate; the share of which that fell to his two eldest sons, the Doctor and his younger brother, James, they in time, by gainful traffic in the same old place, made more than equal to the entire estate, of which a quarter only came to them. Thousands and tens of thousands of tons of golden butter and cheese, hundreds of thousands of bushels of rye, oats, flaxseed, buckwheat, and corn, millions of eggs and skeins of linen and woollen yarn have been bartered at Belfield Green by the country folks, in exchange for rum, molasses, tea, coffee, salt, and codfish, enough to freight the royal navy. Time was when folks came twenty miles to Belfield post-office, and when a dusty miller and his men, at the old red mill standing on the brook at the foot of the valley, took toll from half the grists in Hillsdale County. But that was long ago, when people who lived twenty miles away from Hartford went to the city scarcely twice in a dozen years,—in the good old days of turnpikes, stage-coaches, and wayside taverns, before rail-roads were built to carry all the trade to great, overgrown towns and cities. Now-a-days, as I have said, it is hard to find a village of its size and rank in all the land, which is more quiet, at ordinary times, than Belfield Green.
CHAPTER II.
Every community has its quota of great men; and in this respect a country village is often, in proportion to its numbers, as well endowed as the capital itself. So Belfield has her magnates whom she delights to honor. Chief among them used to be numbered the late Doctor John Bugbee, a worthy gentleman, now gathered to his fathers in the ancient burying-ground behind the meeting-house. He was not, to be sure, esteemed by all, especially the women, to be so great a man as the Reverend Jabez Jaynes, A. M., who, by virtue of his sacred office and academical honors, took formal precedence of every mere layman in the parish.
But with this notable exception, Doctor Bugbee was the peer of every other dignitary, whether civil, military, or ecclesiastical, within the borders of the town. But when I say the Doctor was a great man in Belfield, I do not mean to aver, or to be understood, that, in person, he was of colossal bulk or stature; neither is it true that his intellect was of a quality so far superior to the average of human minds as to make him a giant in that re-
