FORMER INHABITANTS. 
277 
prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat 
and dog and hens were all burned up together. She 
led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old fre¬ 
quenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her 
house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over 
her gurgling pot, — “ Ye are all bones, bones !” I have 
seen bricks amid the oak copse there. 
Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, 
lived Brister Freeman, “ a handy Negro,” slave of 
Squire Cummings once,—• there where grow still the 
apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large old 
trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my 
taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lin¬ 
coln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the un¬ 
marked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in 
the retreat from Concord, — where he is styled “ Sippio 
Brister,” — Scipio Africanus he had some title to be 
called, — “ a man of color,” as if he were discolored. 
It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; 
which was but an indirect way of informing me that 
he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable 
wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly, — large, round, 
and black, blacker than any of the children of night, 
such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or 
since. 
Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in 
the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Strat- 
ten family; whose orchard once covered all the slope of 
Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch- 
pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish 
still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. 
Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location, on 
the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood ; 
