THE SOUTH SIDE

   The contractor who had been building the house took posses-sion of the property in settlement of Mr. Davey's obligations to  him, but he did nothing about completing the work and finally swapped the whole place — some two hundred acres — for a large motor boat. The ex-yachtsman, who became the new    owner of the house, made the kitchen wing habitable, but the    front section remained untouched until Mr. Hamlen of Wayland bought the property in the late 1920s, roughly twenty years       after the first sod had been turned for Mr. Davey.
   We owned the adjoining property to the south, which was     once the Lemuel Smith farm. There is a high hill on the place       that my father called Mount Lemuel, and he maintained that he could see the dome of the Rhode Island State House from its summit on a clear day.
   A quarter of a mile further brought us to Winter Street, a long   and sparsely populated road that led to the Loker farm at the town's southern boundary. One summer the Lokers rented their barns and pastures to a Mr. and Mrs. Green who brought a lot of wild horses from the west and several cowboys to train them.    The Sunday rodeos there became popular immediately and drew   a large crowd. We often rode over to watch the excitement, and finally bought a horse that had been broken to the saddle.
   One day Miss Bridge, headmistress of Pigeon Hill School, em-barassed me greatly by calling me up before the class and telling  me to stand beside her desk.
   "I understand you bought one of the wild horses," she said

   I told her that we had.
   "And what's its name?"
   "Casey Jones," I replied with enthusiasm.

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