United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can allege.

During the old gentleman's absence that winter Halstead had become worse than ever and had also begun making trouble at the district school. His special crony at school was Alfred Batchelder, who had an extremely bad influence on him.

So far as I know, Batchelder, in Pasadena, still has the monopoly on architectural tiles for the entire Pacific coast. Other European countries besides Holland are interestingly represented. The Italian building is a dignified building of pure Florentine Renaissance lines, with here and there a modern note.

The old Squire did so, and the next spring both trees blossomed. They bore bountifully that summer and every season afterward, until they died. We had a young neighbor, Alfred Batchelder, who was fond of foraging by night for plums, grapes, and pears in the orchards of his neighbors. His own family did not raise fruit; they thought it too much trouble to cultivate the trees.

Ben Murch, coming next, landed on top of Newman. Alfred Batchelder, Ephraim Darnley, Absum Glinds, Melzar Tibbetts and my cousin, Halstead, followed Ben, till with incredible suddenness nine of the boys, all almost men-grown, were piled in a squirming heap on the floor!

We must have your promise in writing." He sent me into the house for paper and pencil, and then set Addison to write a pledge for the boys to sign. As nearly as I remember, it ran like this: "We, the undersigned, Harvey Yeatton and Alfred Batchelder, confess that we have been robbing gardens and stealing our neighbors' fruit for four years.

Saturday and Sunday passed, however, and then all the following week, with no word from them. On Tuesday evening, when they had been gone eleven days, Mrs. Batchelder hastened in with alarming news for us. She had had a letter from Alfred, she said, written from Berlin Falls in New Hampshire, where he had gone to work in a mill; but he had not said one word about Halstead!

Farman, consul-general, and J. M. Batchelder, esq., have been appointed as commissioners to participate in this work. The organization of the reform tribunals will probably be continued for another period of five years.

"Let him go, and good riddance," Addison said, and we decided not to tell grandmother or the girls what we suspected. In fact, I fear that we hoped Halstead would go. The following Friday afternoon while the rest of us were at school both boys disappeared. That evening Mrs. Batchelder sent over to inquire whether Alfred was at our house.

There is another legend that Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all distantly related through the Batchelder family. There are said to be red and black Batchelders, like the Douglas family in Scotland; and the black Batchelders have a rare gift of intellect which only comes to the surface when united with some other stock.