noon
Since we wished to avoid unloading the hogs , we took dry corn and troughs for feeding them in the wagons and buckets for fetching water to them . The old Squire went along with us for the first fifteen miles to see us well on our way , then left us and walked to a railroad station a mile or two off the wagon road , where he took the morning train into Portland , in order to make arrangements for marketing the hogs . Everything went well during the morning , although the hogs diffused a bad odor along the highway . Toward noon we stopped by the wayside , near the Upper Village of the New Gloucester Shakers , to rest and feed the horses , and to give the hogs water . About one o'clock we went on down the hill to Sabbath Day Pond and into the woods beyond it . The loads were heavy and the horses were plodding on slowly , when , just round a turn of the road in the woods ahead , we heard a deep , awful sound , like nothing that had ever come to our ears before . For an instant I thought it was thunder , it rumbled so portentously : _ Hough -- hough -- hough -- hough-er-er-er-er-hhh !