The Man Who Stole A Meeting-House

Man Who Stole A Meeting-House,
by J. T. Trowbridge

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Title: The Man Who Stole A Meeting-House 1878, From "Coupon
Bonds"
Author: J. T. Trowbridge
Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23165]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE MAN WHO STOLE A MEETING-HOUSE
By J. T. Trowbridge

From "Coupon Bonds."
Copyright 1878, by James R. Osgood & Co
On a recent journey to the Pennsylvania oil regions, I stopped one
evening with a fellow-traveler at a village which had just been thrown
into a turmoil of excitement by the exploits of a horse-thief. As we sat
around the tavern hearth, after supper, we heard the particulars of the
rogue's capture and escape fully discussed; then followed many another
tale of theft and robbery, told amid curling puffs of tobacco-smoke;
until, at the close of an exciting story, one of the natives turned to my
traveling acquaintance, and, with a broad laugh, said, "Kin ye beat that,
stranger?"
"Well, I don't know--maybe I could if I should try. I never happened to
fall in with any such tall horse-stealing as you tell of, but I knew a man
who stole a meeting-house once."
"Stole a meetin'-house! That goes a little beyant anything yit,"
remarked another of the honest villagers. "Ye don't mean he stole it and
carried it away?"
"Stole it and carried it away," repeated my traveling companion,
seriously, crossing his legs, and resting his arm on the hack of his chair.
"And, more than all that, I helped him."
"How happened that?--for you don't look much like a thief yourself."
All eyes were now turned upon my friend, a plain New England farmer,
whose honest homespun appearance and candid speech commanded
respect.
"I was his hired man, and I acted under orders. His name was
Jedwort--Old Jedwort, the boys called him, although he wasn't above
fifty when the crooked little circumstance happened which I'll make as
straight a story of as I can, if the company would like to hear it."
"Sartin, stranger! sartin! about stealin' the meetin'-house!" chimed in
two or three voices.

My friend cleared his throat, put his hair behind his ears, and with a
grave, smooth face, but with a merry twinkle in his shrewd gray eye,
began as follows:
"Jedwort I said his name was; and I shall never forget how he looked
one particular morning. He stood leaning on the front gate--or rather on
the post, for the gate itself was such a shackling concern a child
couldn't have leaned on't without breaking it down. And Jedwort was
no child. Think of a stoutish, stooping, duck-legged man, with a
mountainous back, strongly suggestive of a bag of grist under his shirt,
and you have him. That imaginary grist had been growing heavier and
heavier, and he more and more bent under it, for the last fifteen years
and more, until his head and neck just came forward out from between
his shoulders like a turtle's from its shell. His arms hung, as he walked,
almost to the ground. Being curved with the elbows outward, he looked
for all the world, in a front view, like a waddling interrogation-point
inclosed in a parenthesis. If man was ever a quadruped, as I've heard
some folks tell, and rose gradually from four legs to two, there must
have been a time, very early in his history, when he went about like Old
Jedwort.
"The gate had been a very good gate in its day. It had even been a
genteel gate when Jedwort came into possession of the place by
marrying his wife, who inherited it from her uncle. That was some
twenty years before, and everything had been going to rack and ruin
ever since.
"Jedwort himself had been going to rack and ruin, morally speaking.
He was a middling decent sort of man when I first knew him; and I
judge there must have been something about him more than common,
or he never could have got such a wife. But then women do marry,
sometimes, unaccountably. I've known downright ugly and
disagreeable fellows to work around, till by and by they would get a
pretty girl fascinated by something in them which nobody else could
see, and then marry her in spite of everything;--just as you may have
seen a magnetizer on the stage make his subjects do