For about ten years of his youth Jedediah had been way from our little Vermont town, wandering in the great world.  From his stories, he had been everywhere on he map.  In the evening, around the stove in the village post-office, when somebody read aloud from the newspaper a remarkable event, all the loafers turned to Jed with wide, malicious grins, to hear him cap it with a yet ore marvelous tale of what had happened to him.  They gathered around the simple-minded little old man, their tongues in their cheeks, and drew from him one silly, impossible, boastful story after another.  They made him amplify circumstantially by clumsily artful questions, and poked one another in the ribs with delight over his deluded joy in their sympathetic interest.

As he grew older, his yarns solidified like folk-lore, into a consecrated and legendary form, which he repeated endlessly without variation.  There were many of them—­“How I drove a team of four horses over a falling bridge,” “How I interviewed the King of Portugal,” “How I saved big Sam Harden’s life in the forest fire.”  But the favorite one was, “How I rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts.”  This was the particular flaunting, sumptuous yarn which everybody made old Jed bring out for company.  If a stranger remarked, “Old man Chillingworth can tell a tale or two, can’t he?” everybody started up eagerly with the cry:  “Oh, but have you heard him tell the story of how he rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts?”

If the answer was negative; all business was laid aside until the withered little old man was found, pottering bout some of the odd jobs by which he earned his living.  He was always as pleased as Punch to be asked to perform, and laid aside his tools with a foolish, bragging grin on his face, of which grandfather has told me so many times that it seems as if I had really seen it.

This is how he told the story, always word for word the same way: 

“Wa’al, sir, I’ve had queer things happen to me in my time, hain’t I, boys?”—­at which the surrounding crowd always wagged mocking heads—­“but nothin’ to beat that.  When I was ashore wunst, from one of my long v’y’ges on the sea, I was to Kennettown, Massachusetts.”

“How’d ye come to go there, Jed?” This was a question never to be omitted.

“Oh, I had a great sight of money to take to some folks that lived there.  The captain of our ship had died at sea, and he give me nine thousand five hundred and seventy-two English gold guineas, to take to his brother and sister.”

Here he always stared around at the company, and accepted credulously the counterfeit coin of grotesquely exaggerated amazement which was given him.

“Wa’al, sir, I done it.  I give the gold to them as it belonged to, and I was to leave town on the noon stagecoach.  I was stayin’ in the captain’s brother’s house.  It was spang up against the woods, on the edge of town; and, I tell ye, woods was woods in them days.