to candlelight to get the better of the climate have leisure to discover
whether or no Blueb'ry Tom had any kin?

At some period in an almost forgotten past there
had been a house on Tom's particular patch of the plains.
It had long since tumbled into ruins and served for fire-wood
and even the chimney bricks had disappeared one by one,
as the monotonous seasons came and went.

Tom had settled himself in an old tool-shop, corn-house, or rude
out-building of some sort that had belonged to the ruined cottage.
Here he had set up his house-hold gods; and since no one else
had ever wanted a home in this dreary tangle of berry bushes,
where the only shade came from stunted pines that flung shriveled
arms to the sky and dropped dead cones to the sterile earth,
here he remained unmolested.

In the lower part of the hut he kept his basket stuff
and his collection of two-legged and three-legged chairs.
In the course of evolution they never sprouted another leg,
those chairs; as they were given to him, so they remained.
The upper floor served for his living-room, and was reached
by a ladder from the ground, for there was no stairway inside.

No one had ever been in the little upper chamber.
When a passer-by chanced to be-think him that Tom's
hermitage was close at hand, he sometimes turned in his
team by a certain clump of white birches and drove nearer
to the house, intending to remind Tom that there was a chair
to willow-bottom the next time he came to the village.