er-breeze? Don't that expand your lungs? And
the whiff of the fresh clover-blossoms? I come out here to study my
sermons, did you know? Nature is so simple and grand here, a man could
not well say a mean or unbrotherly thing while he stays. It forces you
to be 'a faithful witness' to the eternal truth. There is good fishing
hereabouts, eh, Jim?"--calling to the driver. "Do you see that black
pool under the sycamore?"

"_I_ could not call it 'faithful witnessing' to delight in taking even a
fish's life," dryly said his niece.

The Doctor winced.

"It's the old Adam in me, I suppose. You'll have to be charitable to the
different making-up of people, Mary."

However, he was silent for a while after that, with rather an
extinguished feeling, bursting out again when they reached the gate of a
little snug place by the road-side.

"Here is where my little friend Ann lives. There's a wife for you! 'And
though she rules him, never shows she rules.' They've a dairy-farm, you
know, back of the hills; but they live here because it was her father's
toll-house then, and they won't give up the old place. I like such
notions. Andy's full of them. There he is! Hillo, Fawcett!"

Andy came out from the kitchen-garden, his freckled face redder than his
hair, his eyes showing his welcome. Dr. Bowdler was an old tried friend
now of his and Ann's. "He took a heap of nonsense out of me," he used to
say.

"No, no, we'll not stop now," said the Doctor; "we are going on to
Starke's, and Ann is not in, I see. I will stop in the evening for my
glass of buttermilk, though, and a bunch of country-grown flowers."

But they waited long enough to discuss the price of poultry, etc., in
market, before they drove on. Miss Defourchet looked wearied.

"Such things seem so paltry while the country is in the state it is,"
she said.

"Well, my dear, so it is. But it's 'the work by which Andy thrives,' you
know. And I like it, somehow."

The lady had worked nobly in the hospitals last winter, and naturally
she wanted to see every head and hand at work on some noble scheme or
task for the world's good. The hearty, comfortable quiet of the Starkes'
little farm-house tired her. It was such a sluggish life of nothings,
she thought,--even when Jane had brought her chair close to the window
where the sunshine came in broadest and clearest through the
buttonwood-leaves. Jane saw the look, and it troubled her. She was not
much of a talker, only when with h