cape it.
She lay awake nights, planning ways to make a start toward prosperity;
she propounded her ideas at breakfast. To save time in getting him
early to work she began feeding the horses as soon as she was up, so
that George could go to work immediately after breakfast; but she soon
found she might as well save her strength. He would not start to
harness until he had smoked, mostly three quarters of an hour. That
his neighbours laughed at him and got ahead of him bothered him not at
all. All they said and all Kate said, went, as he expressed it, "in at
one ear, out at the other."

One day in going around the house Kate was suddenly confronted by a
thing she might have seen for three years, but had not noticed. Leading
from the path of bare, hard-beaten earth that ran around the house
through the grass, was a small forking path not so wide and well
defined, yet a path, leading to George's window. She stood staring at
it a long time with a thoughtful expression on her face.

That night she did not go to bed when she went to her room. Instead she
slipped out into the night and sitting under a sheltering bush she
watched that window. It was only a short time until George crawled
from it, went stealthily to the barn, and a few minutes later she saw
him riding barebacked on one of the horses he had bridled, down the
footpath beside the stream toward town. She got up and crossing the
barnyard shut the gate after him, and closed the barn door. She went
back to the house and closed his window and lighting a lamp set it on
his dresser in front of his small clock. His door was open in the
morning when she passed it on her way to the kitchen, so she got
breakfast instead of feeding the horses. He came in slowly, furtively
watching her. She worked as usual, saying no unpleasant word. At
length he could endure it no longer.

"Kate," he said, "I broke a bolt in the plow yesterday, and I never
thought of it until just as I was getting into bed, so to save time I
rode in to Walden and got another last night. Ain't I a great old
economist, though?"

"You are a great something," she said. "'Economist' would scarcely be
my name for it. Really, George, can't you do better than that?"

"Better than what?" he demanded.

"Better than telling such palpable lies," she said. "Better than
crawling out windows instead of using your doors like a man; better
than being the most shiftless farmer of your neighbourhood in the
d