In this chapter, The Boarders, Ruth Crosby introduces the people who made up the group of “summer boarders” staying at the Locke Mountain House in the summer of about 1907.

THE BOARDERS

Upon entering the dining room, we saw two long tables, each seating at least fourteen people, placed at right angles to each other. One was parallel to the wall separating the dining room from the sitting room; the other was in the alcove at the far end, parallel to the north wall. In the southwest corner, to our left as we came in from the entry off the porch, was a round table where our family sometimes sat. Now, however, I was happy to see that we were placed at the first long table with some of our oldest friends. After we were all seated, I took a quick look around the table and saw that I knew everyone.

At one end, with her back to the door, and starting to serve from a large platter of eggs baked in cream, was Mrs. Henry T. Finck, Aunt Abbie to all of us children. Around the corner to her right was her husband, quite a famous man, a music critic on the New York Post. Although it seemed natural to call her Aunt Abbie, it was much harder to call him Uncle Henry. He didn't seem like an uncle. The Fincks came early to Miss Locke's every year and stayed late. They always had the big front southeast bedroom of the farmhouse. Either between the cottage and the orchard, or sometimes out behind the farmhouse, they had a garden with a high chicken wire fence around it to keep out the cows if they strayed from the pasture. Mr. Finck used to work in the garden early every morning and in dry weather water it late in the afternoon.

The rest of the time, unless a mountain climb or a picnic had been arranged, he wrote up in his room. He couldn't stand any noise, especially whistling. Every boy on the place knew of his prejudice, but sometimes one would forget. If Andrew Smith, who liked to whistle, started in near the farmhouse, Aunt Abbie would say, "Andrew!" and he would remember and stop. When Mr. Finck was working up in his room, he used to stuff cotton in his ears. His face was round with red cheeks, his thin brown hair was untidy, and his clothes were rumpled. In one old jacket which he wore most of the time Aunt Abbie had lined the pockets with leather or rubber. Every morning after breakfast he would go around from table to table and pick up all the chop bones or other meat scraps that might be left and stuff them in his pockets for Laddie. The collie Laddie was the Fincks' dog. They had bought him as a puppy after Miss Locke's old Shep had to be put to sleep when he was eighteen. But when the Fincks went back to New York in the fall, they left him with Miss Locke for the winter. Then he was her dog.

One summer when I had an upset stomach, it was so hot up in my room in the afternoon that Mr. Finck offered to carry me downstairs to a hammock in front of the farmhouse in the shade. As he stepped out the front door with me, Laddie and a dog going by began to fight. I thought Mr. Finck was going to drop me when he ran to separate them, but he did dump me into the hammock first. Aunt Abbie was one of my dearest friends. She had glossy black hair, soft brown eyes, and a keen sense of humor. She and Miss Locke both understood a good joke. Once when it was a long time since we had had baked eggs, a favorite supper dish, Aunt Abbie and three other ladies made large cardboard signs and printed one of the words: WE WANT BAKED EGGS on each. Then when they saw Miss Locke coming up from her vegetable garden, down near the river where the fog protected it from early frosts, they went to meet her, each carrying one of the words. When Miss Locke saw them, she set down the two heavy pails of peas she was carrying and laughed until she cried. We soon had baked eggs. I think it was Aunt Abbie, too, when she saw Miss Locke with Alfred one morning when the chops for breakfast had been very small, who said, "Oh, I'm glad to see Alfred. I was afraid we might have had his chops for breakfast this morning." Miss Locke enjoyed that joke just as much. The breakfast lamb chops and other meats except chicken came from Chauncey Bryant's meat cart, which called at Miss Locke's twice a week.* Coming early in the season as she did, Aunt Abbie often helped Miss Locke decide which rooms should be given to the boarders, especially to those who were coming for the first time.

I loved to go with Aunt Abbie after breakfast when she cut the flowers, pink and white and red poppies and many colored sweet peas, and then help her arrange them in the dining room afterwards.

The stems of the poppies she always dipped in hot water for a few seconds because she said they kept better that way. Then she arranged vases for the dining tables, usually two on the long ones, and other vases for the rooms of new arrivals expected that day. When I was very small, Aunt Abbie used to play with me after supper before I went to bed. As we sat on the porch, I in a little rocking-chair beside or in front of her larger one, we would play I was her husband Robin who was driving her through woods filled with wolves and other wild beasts, which I shot at and saved us from cruel deaths night after night. I think we girls loved best the nights Aunt Abbie dressed up for us in her beautiful red dress with a gold chain over her hair. Always if we found bright red bunchberries on our walks or picnics, we took them back to Aunt Abbie to arrange with a gold chain in her black hair.*

While Aunt Abbie was serving the baked eggs from one platter at her end of the table, Uncle Carl Hansmann was doing the same thing from another platter at his end. Around the corner to his right sat Aunt Bessie, who was Aunt Abbie's sister. I sometimes used to wish that Aunt Abbie had married Uncle Carl. I loved them both and accepted Aunt Bessie and Uncle Henry chiefly because I loved the others. Uncle Carl was a lawyer in New York. The Hansmanns and Fincks lived together with Aunt Abbie's and Aunt Bessie's mother, Mrs. Cushman. Sometimes she came to Miss Locke's with them. She was a nice old lady, who always had the downstairs room in the farmhouse. Aunt Bessie and Uncle Carl had the room over it, next to mine.

My earliest memories of Miss Locke’s (summer boarding farm) centered around Uncle Carl. He was a fine-looking man with brown hair, graying at the temples, and a neatly trimmed gray mustache. He used to carry me on his shoulder the summer I was two and would lift me up to see the spiders under the eaves of the porch roof. I remember well that the summer I was three I had a little red sweater that went on over my head, buttoned on the shoulder, and turned up around the bottom. Uncle Carl sometimes let me play with his compass, which I pretended was a watch, but he always wanted me to stay by him when I had it. One day as I was playing with it, I put it in the turned up fold of my sweater and promptly forgot all about it. Sometime later I remembered it, felt for it, and found it gone. I was ashamed and frightened. I had lost Uncle Carl's compass! How would he find his way in the woods! He might be lost, and I would be to blame. Slowly and sadly I went to find Uncle Carl. When he saw me coming, he called out, "Have you lost something, Little Boy?" I didn't like to have him call me Little Boy as he did that summer because my hair was cut short like a boy's. But when I saw the precious compass in the hand he held out to me, I didn't care what he called me. He had taken it out of my sweater pocket when I wasn't noticing, and it was safe.

Uncle Carl was the leader on all our long walks and mountain climbs. He often drove the pair of horses in the mountain wagon on picnics. He could swing us higher than anyone else, and he used to pick us up and toss us back and forth to air out the barny smell when we came down to dinner after a rainy morning spent in the barn. It was Uncle Carl who took most of the pictures, which he developed and printed himself in the dark room at the back of the bath house. I often went with him to watch. Once when Father came unexpectedly, as he often did, I was there in the dark room with Uncle Carl. One of the girls called through the door, "Papa is here." But I had to wait until Uncle Carl finished the print he was making before I could go out.

Aunt Bessie had weak ankles and couldn't take long walks. We didn't think she was as pretty as Aunt Abbie, but she had a very nice voice and sometimes used to sing to us in the cottage parlor. Helen, who sat next to her now across the table from me, was her favorite among us. Aunt Bessie told her so. I don't think that made Helen like her any better. Helen was invited to visit them all in New York one winter. She went to the opera seven times in one week. Afterwards she confided to Mother that she didn't enjoy it all as much as she pretended to, but she had to be polite.

The Locke Farm boarders in their exploring clothes pose for a group picture at Sunday River where logs being driven from much further upstream became stranded due to low water.

Front row: L to R – Bessie Hansmann, Daisy Crosby, Ellie Crosby, and Gracie Wyeth.

Rear: L to R, J. Howell Crosby, an unknown boarder, Evelyn Pierce, Miss Wyeth, Ruth Crosby, Abbie Finck, and Mr. Pierce.

Phyllis sat next to Helen across the table, and on her other side was Mr. Spaulding. He was a quiet man with a bushy beard, who used to worry some of the boarders because he would go off on long mountain rambles all alone without telling anyone where he was going. He didn't seem to take much interest in us children, although he once carried Phyllis nearly all the way up Mt. Will when she was only seven and got tired. I knew him best for his queer notion of taking pictures to illustrate a story. The summer before, he had asked Frank and me to go down to the river with him to pose in a picture to represent Narcissus and the nymph Echo. Frank had to get down on his knees at a quiet pool in the river and look at his reflection while I came out of the bushes above and behind him. It all struck us very funny. Frank with his red hair, dancing brown eyes, and freckled face was supposed to be falling in love with his own image in the water, and I, rather pudgy, wearing glasses, my hair tied up in bobs, was trying to attract his attention but had supposedly lost my voice except to echo what he said. We got the giggles over it. Mr. Spaulding later sent each of us a copy of the picture, printed in brown and mounted on gray pasteboard. Uncle Carl once took a picture of her and me. She was dressed like an Irish woman in an old skirt and a shawl and had her dark hair down in two braids over her shoulders. She had her arm around me. I had on the dark red and black wool plaid dress that I almost sat through in school the winter before. We always took some warm clothes with us to Miss Locke's because the August early mornings and evenings were often chilly. Sally was one of the chief leaders when we played charades in the evening. She had wonderful ideas for them. Her mother had been with her the year before, a pleasant old lady who had taught me to do netting. I had made several Christmas presents by putting edges of netting on round doilies.

Finally at our table was Miss Jessie Smith, a New York school teacher and good friend of Aunt Abbie’s. She had pretty white hair and a face that looked too young to go with it. She liked to walk and climb. Sometimes her father was at Miss Locke's with her. Once a group was all ready to start out on a mountain climb when Miss Jessie couldn't find her father. She wouldn't go unless she knew where he was. He might have wandered off somewhere and been hurt. Just then Phyllis joined the group, heard the conversation, and said, "Oh, Mr. Smith is asleep up in the orchard." "That's all right, then," Miss Jessie said. The mountain party could start.

The baked eggs and hot baking powder biscuits and butter had disappeared now, and Aunt Abbie and Uncle Carl were serving big dark wild raspberries into glass sauce dishes. Plates of chocolate frosted cake were on the table and glass pitchers of cream and glass sugar bowls. The grown-ups were having tea or coffee. We children had milk. I glanced at Pauline beside me. She was eating her raspberries the way she always did since she once found a tiny spider inside one. She picked each one up separately with her spoon and looked it all over carefully before putting it into her mouth. She wouldn't use any cream because that would make it harder to see any little bug that might have been overlooked.

As I reached for the cream pitcher in front of me, I felt the embarrassment I had felt at breakfast one morning a year or two before. I had sat beside Mrs. Dyke, rather an old lady, who was talking and talking to her neighbor on the other side. Mother had taught me not to interrupt when others were talking. My oatmeal was growing cold, and the cream in front of Mrs. Dyke was just beyond my reach. Should I interrupt and ask her to pass it, or should I try to reach it? I decided to try. Instantly she turned on me as my cheeks burned and said, "If you wish for the cream, you should ask me to pass it to you. You should not reach for it." I was glad I couldn't see Mrs. Dyke in the dining room now. She evidently was not here this year. I think it was Mrs. Dyke who was responsible for an expression often quoted in our family. One day down at the river a little girl, I've forgotten who, was beating with a stick a leaf at the edge of the water. "Don't be rude to the leaf, dear," she was told by Mrs. Dyke, who wanted to improve her manners, too.

Over at the round table in the corner sat the Deane family from New York: Mr. and Mrs. Deane, Miss Bertha, Miss Edith, and Alphonse, who was about my sister Helen's age. Mr. Deane wore very thick glasses. His eyes were bad. He had the strangest watch I had ever seen. Sometimes he would show it to me. If he pressed a little knob on the outside, the watch would strike the nearest hour. Miss Edith Deane was a great walker and always joined whatever activities were going on. We often teased Phyllis about what she had said when it was suggested that Miss Edith might stop over to see us one year when she was going home later than we were. "You'd better be sure to let us know when you are coming," Phyllis said, "so we won't have warmed up hash." Miss Bertha was my favorite of the family. She wasn't very strong and couldn't do all that Miss Edith and Alphonse could. But she could take short walks as far as the river and used to help me build sand houses there.

Some young boarders: Front row left to right: Phyllis Crosby, Ellie Crosby, and Ruth Crosby.

Rear left to right: Winifred and Nelson Ogden, Helen Crosby and Alphonse Deane.

1904