, by moonlight, amid a baying of dogs so
energetic that it roused every living thing in the barnyard to protest
in a peevish chorus of clucking and grunting and quacking and squealing.

"What on airth!" exclaimed Mrs. Gabbard, his farmer's wife, standing at
the back door, in calico skirt and big shawl. When she saw who it was,
her irritated voice changed to welcome. "Why, howdy, Mr. Scarborough!
I thought it was old John Lovel among the chickens or at the granary.
I might 'a' knowed he wouldn't come in the full of the moon and no
clouds."

"Go straight back to bed, Mrs. Gabbard, and don't mind me," said
Scarborough. "I looked after my horse and don't want anything to eat.
Where's Eph?"

"Can't you hear?" asked Mrs. Gabbard, dryly. And in the pause a lusty
snore penetrated. "When anything out of the way happens, I get up and
nose around to see whether it's worth while to wake him."

Scarborough laughed. "I've come for a few days--to get some exercise,"
he said. "But don't wake me with the others to-morrow morning. I'm
away behind on sleep and dead tired."

He went to bed--the rooms up-stairs in front were reserved for him and
were always ready. His brain was apparently as busy and as determined
not to rest as on the worst of his many bad nights during the past four
months. But the thoughts were vastly different; and soon those
millions of monotonous murmurings from brook and field and forest were
soothing his senses. He slept soundly, with that complete relaxing of
every nerve and muscle which does not come until the mind wholly yields
up its despotic control and itself plunges into slumber unfathomable.

The change of the air with dawn slowly wakened him. It was only a
little after five, but he felt refreshed. He got himself into farm
working clothes and went down to the summer dining-room--a shed against
the back of the house with three of its walls latticed. In the
adjoining kitchen Mrs. Gabbard and her daughters, Sally and Bertha,
were washing the breakfast dishes--Gabbard and his two sons and the
three "hands" had just started for the meadows with the hay wagons.

"Good morning," said Scarborough, looking in on the three women.

They stopped work and smiled at him, and the girls dried their hands
and shook hands with him--all with an absolute absence of embarrassment
that, to one familiar with the awkward shyness of country people, would
have told almost the whole story of Scarborough's characte