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Neither of the two in the great room heard the footfalls of one who approached in the dusk across the puncheon floor of the wide gallery. Dan Andersen, for reasons of his own, had also come on up the trail to the hotel. Perhaps he intended to make certain inquiries; but he never got even so far as the door. The voice of Donatelli caught and held him as it had her other auditor.

"An' yit he jes sot underfoot, 'mongst the cat an' the dogs, jes ez humble!" said Stephen. "I'd git him back even ef he warn't no kin ter me, Eveliny," declared Tim, and he spoke advisedly, remembering that the youth was a Kittredge. Still Evelina said not a word. All that night she silently walked the puncheon floor, while the rest of the household slept.

The house was a typical pioneer cabin, with a puncheon floor, which was uneven, dirty, and splotched with grease. The girl was bare-footed and wearing a dirty white sort of cotton gown of the modern Mother Hubbard type, that looked a good deal like a big gunny sack. From what came under my observation later, it can safely be stated that it was the only garment she had on.

His body was a wine-pipe or a rum puncheon, or something of that character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles with the necks outward for hands.

They say that sometimes wine-growers, when they go down into their cellars, find in a puncheon no wine, but a huge fungus. That is what befalls the Christianity of people that never let air in, and never speak their faith out. 'We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard'; and if we do not speak, the vision fades and the sound becomes faint.

It was too near night to distribute the money among the various farmers. After consulting his good wife as to the best place for secreting it he decided to bury the money in the ground beneath the puncheon floor.

Yet 'tis as fair a Jamaica as ever Griggs put ashore i' the dark." "Griggs!" I cried, the whole affair coming to me: Griggs, Upper Marlboro', South River, Grafton and the rector plotting in the stalls, and Mr. Silas Ridgeway the accomplice. "Ay, Griggs," replied he; "ye may well repeat it, the , I'll lay a puncheon he'll be hailing you shortly.

Judging by his hat, as Professor Agassiz judges of fish by their scales, he must have been forty feet high, by about ten or fifteen broad; and if his strength corresponded with his gigantic proportions, I fancy he could have knocked the gable-end off a house with a single blow of his fist, or kicked the head out of a puncheon of rum, and swallowed the contents at a single draught, without the least difficulty.

On these were laid some boards, and on the boards a shake-down of leaves, covered with skins and old petticoats. The table was a hewed puncheon supported by four legs. They had a few pewter and tin dishes to eat from, but the most minute inventory of their effects makes no mention of knives or forks. Their cooking utensils were a Dutch oven and a skillet.

If the prices had been those current in the middle of the eighteenth century these crops would have yielded the proprietor great profits. But at £15 per hogshead and £10 per puncheon, the prices generally current in the island in the seventeen-nineties, the gross return was but about £6000 sterling, and the net earnings of the establishment accordingly not above £2000.