But when the sun touches the buttercups on the western hills. Peter is done. The farm is all lace, nets float on its daisies from the seashore to the spruces, and butterflies are coming up through its taut meshes, clear of all knots and all seaweed. And this head-down day is not all lost. For Peter has discovered a place in a meadow which is white with wild strawberry blossoms. He puts the place down in his memory.
And that night Uncle John, rejuvenated by shad steaks, comes into full flower and full cry. He comes our to Peter, after his afternoon's siesta on the parlor couch, and sits by the boy on the south-sloping hill. The old haunted house of Quahaug Bay lies at bis feet and Peter's, no bigger than a birch chip at the rim of the twilit ocean. It is all very still and clear. The long northern afterglow washes over the seacoast. Voices of distant children at play and men at work on their lobster traps on wharves come up to Peter and his uncle as his uncle tells him ghost story after ghost story about the specters in that very haunted house down there at their toes. Uncle John knew those ghosts personally as a boy on this coast.
There was every kind of “hant” there in the small house. How they could all crowd into so small a place bears Peter, bur crowd in they did. There was the pretty lady who played on Sunday evenings on the organ that wasn't there. Uncle John had sat in the parlor there and heard her.
But the best of all is the story of the fisherman who used to sit on the from doorstep there with his long-bearded head right on his own knee, and his bead kept singing “Rock of Ages,” It seems that that was the hymn the old fellow had been singing the night he came home unexpectedly early from the prayer meeting and found bis wife carrying on with her fancy-man right in the parlor on the horsehair sofa, in spite of its prickles and slipperiness. The old husband took down bis shotgun, put it under his beard, and blew his head off into kingdom come. They never found hide or hair of it anywhere, though they looked hard. It was a terrible thing. It was, says Uncle John, a great shame and blot on that house. The old fellow had the best bass voice in the country. They missed it awful at the prayer meetings. But Providence made it up to the poor old man in the here after, and gave him a brand new head to hold on his knee and sing “Rock of Ages” on the front doorstep every Sunday evening when it was fair. Uncle John heard him sing, saw him, too.
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