Eben Holden | Page 2

would ask often; and the
old man would answer, 'No; they ain't real sassy this time o' year. They
lay 'round in the deep dingles every day.'
Then the small voice would sing idly or prattle with an imaginary being
that had a habit of peeking over the edge of the basket or would shout a
greeting to some bird or butterfly and ask finally: 'Tired, Uncle Eb?'
Sometimes the old gentleman would say 'not very', and keep on,
looking thoughtfully at the ground. Then, again, he would stop and
mop his bald head with a big red handkerchief and say, a little tremor
of irritation in his voice: 'Tired! who wouldn't be tired with a big
elephant like you on his back all day? I'd be 'shamed o' myself t' set
there an' let an old man carry me from Dan to Beersheba. Git out now
an' shake yer legs.'
I was the small boy and I remember it was always a great relief to get
out of the basket, and having run ahead, to lie in the grass among the
wild flowers, and jump up at him as he came along.
Uncle Eb had been working for my father five years before I was born.
He was not a strong man and had never been able to carry the wide
swath of the other help in the fields, but we all loved him for his
kindness and his knack of story-telling. He was a bachelor who came
over the mountain from Pleasant Valley, a little bundle of clothes on
his shoulder, and bringing a name that enriched the nomenclature of
our neighbourhood. It was Eben Holden.
He had a cheerful temper and an imagination that was a very
wilderness of oddities. Bears and panthers growled and were very
terrible in that strange country. He had invented an animal more
treacherous than any in the woods, and he called it a swift. 'Sumthin'
like a panther', he described the look of it a fearsome creature that lay
in the edge of the woods at sundown and made a noise like a woman

crying, to lure the unwary. It would light one's eye with fear to hear
Uncle Eb lift his voice in the cry of the swift. Many a time in the
twilight when the bay of a hound or some far cry came faintly through
the wooded hills, I have seen him lift his hand and bid us hark. And
when we had listened a moment, our eyes wide with wonder, he would
turn and say in a low, half-whispered tone: ' 'S a swift' I suppose we
needed more the fear of God, but the young children of the pioneer
needed also the fear of the woods or they would have strayed to their
death in them.
A big bass viol, taller than himself, had long been the solace of his
Sundays. After he had shaved - a ceremony so solemn that it seemed a
rite of his religion - that sacred viol was uncovered. He carried it
sometimes to the back piazza and sometimes to the barn, where the
horses shook and trembled at the roaring thunder of the strings. When
he began playing we children had to get well out of the way, and keep
our distance. I remember now the look of him, then - his thin face, his
soft black eyes, his long nose, the suit of broadcloth, the stock and
standing collar and, above all, the solemnity in his manner when that
big devil of a thing was leaning on his breast
As to his playing I have never heard a more fearful sound in any time
of peace or one less creditable to a Christian. Weekdays he was
addicted to the milder sin of the flute and, after chores, if there were no
one to talk with him, he would sit long and pour his soul into that
magic bar of boxwood.
Uncle Eb had another great accomplishment. He was what they call in
the north country 'a natural cooner'. After nightfall, when the corn was
ripening, he spoke in a whisper and had his ear cocked for coons. But
he loved all kinds of good fun.
So this man had a boy in his heart and a boy in his basket that evening
we left the old house. My father and mother and older brother had been
drowned in the lake, where they had gone for a day of pleasure. I had
then a small understanding of my loss, hat I have learned since that the
farm was not worth the mortgage and that everything had to be sold.
Uncle Eb and I - a little lad, a very little lad of six - were all that was

left of what had