Up Moosilauke (1840) - Forty Foot
". . . Up ahead, ranged around a wagon that Benjie recognized as Fortyfoot Ellsworth's, were ten or a dozen men, the usual number of locals who out of habit gathered by Benjamin Little's inn at the end of many afternoons. Fortyfoot's mare was tied. He himself sat backwards on the wagon seat to complete the circle of men leaning on the sides.
From his position on the seat it wasn't as readily evident how small he was. In a forward corner of the wagon "General Burgoyne's sword" was crudely sheathed in its usual place between the inside of the wagon bed and a nailed-on board. Fortyfoot's heroic grandfather had supposedly captured the sword from a British officer during the Revolution, but Fortyfoot tarnished this family tradition a bit with his conflicting claims of sometimes Bennington and at other times Saratoga as the scene for his grandfather's exploit.
The sword, too, failed to display fine, European craftsmanship to a viewer, but rather bore the look of having been pounded out of bar iron by a blacksmith who'd been too lazy to finish making a scythe and had hung the sword label onto it as a convenient excuse for stopping work. Over the years Fortyfoot's frequent display of the sword and unreasonable pride in it had given his neighbors yet another reason to target him for numerous pranks, which came most often after occasions when he'd parried their most creative insults and had routed them with his own sharp retorts. . . ."
From "Up Moosilauke - 1840" by Jack Noon, pp. 44-73, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.1). ©1999.
