The farm buildings looked neat and well-cared for.

The sixty-acre wood-lot that stretched from the fields up to the foot of Hedgehog Ledge had been cleaned and cleared of undergrowth until you could drive a team from end to end of it, among the three hundred or more immense old sugar maples and yellow birches.
That wood-lot, indeed, had been the old farmer's special pride.

He loved those big old-growth maples, loved them so well that he would not tap them in the spring for maple sugar.

It shortened the lives of trees, he said, to tap them, particularly large old trees.
It was therefore distressing to see how, after grandsir Cranston died, the farm was allowed to run down and go to ruin.

His wife had died years before; they had no children; and the only relatives were a brother and a nephew in Portland, and a niece in Bangor.