But though the two places
lay within rifle shot of each other, they were almost as completely divided
as if the big river below had rolled between them. Since the great fight
between old Darby and Cove Mills over Henry Clay, there had rarely been
an election in which some members of the two families had not had a "clinch".
They had to be thrown together sometimes "at meeting", and their children
now and then met down on the river fishing, or at "the washing hole",
as the deep place in the little stream below where the branches ran together
was called; but they held themselves as much aloof from each other
as their higher neighbors, the Hampdens and the Douwills,
did on their plantations. The children, of course, would "run together",
nor did the parents take steps to prevent them, sure that they would,
as they grew up, take their own sides as naturally as they themselves
had done in their day. Meantime "children were children",
and they need not be worried with things like grown-up folk.
When Aaron Hall died and left his little farm and all his small belongings
to educate free the children of his poor neighbors, the farmers about
availed themselves of his benefaction, and the children for six miles around
used to attend the little school which was started in the large
hewn-log school-house on the roadside known as "Hall's Free School".
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