The Arkansaw traveler., 1883-10-20
UNCLE ABEL.
Exchange

FAGEaNAe.
 IL is proper, belieyek1o symbolize l town by young woman: but if Tarry- town had ever chosen presiding genius, 1t must have taken the shape of Abel Dowrex. He was Tarrytown itself All the higotry, the intolerable seli-conceit and the kindly feeling of that mountain village lived and moved in the lean figure of the old bachelor.
 The Dowrexes were in TarYtown at the beginning, and the beginning of Tar rytown ran dimly back, we all vaguely felt. behind prehistoric ages. The cave man, If we had never heard ofhim, would have been held as a modern in,erloper be- side our old families. It was President Madison, think, who gave the postoffice 10 one of the Dowrexes. and a member of the family had held the pos, ever since.
 Uncle Abel had been our postmaster for forty years. The one street of the village ran, as everybody knows. down one street and up another. The old Dow rex house, bedded in its orchard and gar deh, stood in the bottom of the cup. in the very center of everything. Sitting on his porch under the big sycamore. tilted back in his hickory chair. Abel could look UP either slope into the front yard ofevery house in town. Whenever Squire piun- kett's wife, in the big house on the top of of the hill, had chicken pie for dinner she would hang a red bandana handkerchief or the pump-handle, which was the sign for Abel to come up. Everybody knew how fond he was of chicken pie and ev- erybody sent for him when that good Pennsylvania dish was on the table Tar ytown was hospitable place It was the universal habit to lay one more cover than was needed for every meal, "in case somebody should drop in :" and we drop- ped in on each other necessarily. No body was so likely to come as the grave, baggy, nut-colored clothes and his brown wig set, like thatch. atop of the wizened face. and nobody was more welcome. But when anybody was in trouble. or '.out of sorts and wanted heartening. he was sure 10 ind his way down to the DowreN house near to supper-time. Crossing the porch you came to Uncle Abel m his warm, snug little office. seated with some old crony over the fire. His father had sat in that split-back chair. with it's sheep skin cushion. Abel took |, the day the old squire died, and then and there be- came the head of the family.
 Al his back was the chcrry-wood case with its twenty pigeon.holcs. in which. time out of mind. Dowrex had kept the letters of Tarptown. Precisely as the clock struck C the tea-bell tinkled inside. Forty years,' Abel was used to say, ",he tea-bell has rung on the stroke of Q. I have brough, sister Sarah into ,olerably regular habits. though she is still inclined to be giddy. These girls. you know"
 Aunt Sarah was two years younger than Abel. As the tea-bell rang she opened the door and stood on the threshold with Come, brother" dropping welcome courtesy to the inevitable rdropper-in. There were not many hints of giddiness in the frail old figure. with its brown gown. white handkerchief, or the sweet smiling face set in the bands of white hair. But it was Abel's humor 10 consider her as still the gay and friyol. ous young beauty whom our grand. mothers remembered.
 The keeping-room behind the office was Aunt Sarah's domain. There was a glittering brass fender and scu,tle (every lump of coal in i, washed and wiped be- fore il was admitted to that spotless re- ;reaib there were her geraniums in the window, and her rocking chair and bible. and lays Devotions," and there was the cosy table spread, and cup of tea such as no other poet ever brewed. and Han nah bringing in her famous griddle cakes from the kitchen. Hannah was as gray and feeble as her misoess. but she had been known as Dowrex's "bound girl {" for half century. The dish of gossip waiting was as tne in quality as the tea. Never had black mark been Jeff on the. character of any human being by single word of this gentle old couple, ve, they handled in their talk every day the lives of all Tarptown for generations. They had nothing else to think of. They had never been twenty miles from home they cared nothing for books. The United States, England. Asia. were. in tact, to them only so many splo,ches of color upon the maps. The world was Tarrytown. Indeed, heaven itself, to which mother and so many familiar folk -Piunketts, Fairlambs and Bassets-had gone, was a much more real place and nearer to Abel than any other foreign country. Father has five children, Sarah and me are here, and the others have gone on to the Good Man, was his homely way of statingjt.
 Being an idle man, for he had little income which kept him comfortably, and having no knowledge of books or any science or craf, all of his energy and large tenderness and sympathy went, during his whole life, to his neighbors. The mere fact that all of their inter course with the outside world came through him gave him peculiar hold on them. He indexed their lives by his pigeon-holes.
 That's the Bassest box" tapping on