The doughty little cobbler made nothing of attacking them
single-handed, and putting them utterly to rout; for he was a dabster
at debate, and entertained as strong a liking for polemics as for
books. Nay, he was a thorn in the side of the parson himself, for
whom he used to lie in wait with knotty questions,--snares set to
entrap the worthy divine, in the hope of beguiling him into a
controversy respecting some abstruse point of doctrine, in which the
cobbler, who had every verse of the Bible at his tongue's end, was not
apt to come off second best.
But one day, Tommy Blake, being at a raising where plenty of liquor
was furnished, (as the fashion used to be,) slipped and fell from a
high beam, and was carried home groaning with a skinful of broken
bones. He died the next day, poor man, and his bedridden widow
survived the shock of witnessing his dreadful agonies and death but a
very little while. Her daughters, two young girls, were left destitute
and friendless. But Major Bugbee, to whom the cobbler's wife had been
remotely akin, and who was at that time first selectman of the town,
took the orphans with him to his house, where they tarried till he
found good places for them.
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