ears shaped the board. New flooring had been laid there, and
painted a handsome gray; the falling trellis between gate and door had
been plumbed and renewed.

New life was everywhere about the old place, yet its old charm was
undisturbed, its old homeliness was unchanged. Comfort had come to
dejection, tidiness had been restored to beauty. The windows of the old
house now looked upon the highway boldly, owing the world nothing in the
way of glass.

Where the sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed
piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of
brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this
brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great
transformation had come. The rails were gone, the brambles were cleared
away, and a neat white fence of pickets stretched in front of the house.
This was flanked on either hand by a high fence of woven wire, new to
that country then, at once the wonder of the old inhabitants, the
despair of prowling hogs and the bewilderment of hens. There was a gate
now where the old gap had been; it swung shut behind one with an eager
little spring, which startled agents and strangers with the sharpness of
its click.

The shrubbery had been cleared of dead wood, and the underlying
generations of withered honeysuckle vines which had spread under the
green upon the old trellis, had been taken away. Freshness was there,
the mark of an eager, vigorous hand. The matted blue grass which sodded
the yard had been cut and trimmed to lines along the path. A great and
happy change had come over the old place, so long under the shadow.
People stopped to admire it as they passed.

"Well, well; it's the doin's of that boy, Joe Newbolt!" they said.

Mrs. Newbolt paused in her clipping of bonnet slats to make a menacing
snip at a big white rooster which came picking around the steps. The
fowl stretched his long neck and turned his bright eye up to his
mistress with a slanting of the head.

"How did you git out of that pen, you old scalawag?" she demanded.

The rooster took a long and dignified step away from her, where he
stood, with little appearance of alarm, turning his head, questioning
her with his shining eye. She made a little lunge with her shears.

"Yes, I'm goin' to tell Joe on you, you scamp!" she threatened.

"_Coo-doot-cut!_" said the rooster, looking about him with a long
stretching of the neck.

"Yes, you bet