and speech could not long be wiled away from the subject. This abrupt
interjection of a new element into his cogitations gave him pause, and
he did not observe the sudden rousing of Tyler Sud-ley from his revery,
and the glance of indignant reproach which he cast on his wife. No man,
however meek, or however bowed down with sorrow, will bear unmoved a
gratuitous mention of his debts; it seems to wound him with all the
rancor of insult, and to enrage him with the hopelessness of adequate
retort or reprisal. It is an indignity, like taunting a ghost with
cock-crow, or exhorting a clergyman to repentance. He flung himself all
at once into the conversation, to bar and baffle any renewed allusion to
that subject, and it was accident rather than intention which made him
grasp Nehemiah in the vise of a quandary also.

"Ye say ye got a store an' a stock o' truck, Nehemiah. Air ye ekal ter
keepin' store an' sech?" he demanded, speculatively, with an inquiring
and doubtful corrugation of his brows, from which a restive lock of hair
was flung backward like the toss of a horse's mane.

"I reckon so," Nehemiah sparely responded, blinking at him across the
fireplace.

"An' ye say ye hev applied fur the place o' postmaster?" Tyler prosed
on. "All that takes a power o' knowledge--readin' an' writin' an'
cipher-in' an' sech. How air ye expectin' to hold out, 'kase I know ye
never hed no mo' larnin' than me, an' I war acquainted with ye till ye
war thirty years old an' better?"

The tenor of this discourse did not comport with his customary suavity
and tactful courtesy toward a guest, but he was much harassed and had
lost his balance. He had a vague idea that Mrs. Sudley hung upon the
flank of the conversation with a complete summary of amounts, dates, and
names of creditors, and he sought to balk this in its inception.
Moreover, his forbearance with Nehemiah, with his presence, his
personality, his mission, had begun to wane. Bitter reflections might
suffice to fill the time were he suffered to be silent; but since a part
in the conversation had been made necessary, he had for it no honeyed
words.

"I'd make about ez fit a postmaster, I know, ez that thar old ow_el_
a-hootin' out yander. I could look smart an' sober like him, but that's
'bout all the fur my school-larnin' kerried me, an' yourn didn't reach
ter the nex' mile-post--an' that I know."

Nehemiah's thin lips seemed dry. More than once his tongue appeared
along their v