his eyes.

"I've been suffering a good deal. I think it's the weather."

"I'm sorry."

"Do you think it's going to snow?"

The husband had lived so long and closely with his wife, that the
mechanism of their minds moved much like the two wall-clocks in
adjoining rooms of the house; which ticked and struck, year after year,
never quite together and never far apart. When David was first with one
and then with another, he was often obliged to answer the same
questions twice--sometimes thrice, since his mother alone required two
identical responses. He replied now with his invariable and patient
courtesy--yet scarcely patient, inasmuch as this did not try him.

"What made you so late?"

David explained again.

"How much hemp did you break?"

"I didn't weigh it, father. Fifty or sixty pounds, perhaps."

"How many more shocks are there in the field?"

"Twelve or fifteen. I wish there were a hundred."

"I wish so, too," said David's mother, smiling plaintively at her
husband.

"John Bailey was here after dinner," remarked David's father. "He has
sold his crop of twenty-seven acres for four thousand dollars. Ten
dollars a hundred."

"That's fine," said David with enthusiasm, thinking regretfully of
their two or three acres.

"Good hemp lands are going to rent for twenty or twenty-five dollars an
acre in the spring," continued his father, watching the effect of his
words.

David got up, and going to the door, reached around against the wall
for two or three sticks of the wood he had piled there. He replenished
the fire, which was going down, and resumed his seat.

For a while father and son discussed in a reserved way matters
pertaining to the farm: the amount of feed in the barn and the chances
of its lasting; crops to be sown in the spring, and in what fields; the
help they should hire--a new trouble at that time. For the negroes,
recently emancipated, were wandering hither and thither over the farms,
or flocking to the towns, unused to freedom, unused to the very wages
they now demanded, and nearly everywhere seeking employment from any
one in preference to their former masters as part of the proof that
they were no longer in slavery. David's father had owned but a single
small family of slaves: the women remained, the man had sought work on
one of the far richer estates in the neighborhood.

They threshed over once more the straw of these familiar topics and
then fell into embarrassed silence. The fath