uiline, and reddish hair that was her cross,
because it curled by nature and she constrained it. Sometimes, when it
kinked unusually, either in moist weather or because she had forgotten
to smooth it, and when the pupils of her eyes enlarged under cumulative
excitement, she looked young and impetuously willful; but the times were
rare, and perhaps her husband had never, since their courting days,
noted any such exhilaration. He was a large, imperious-looking man, with
a cascade of silvery beard which he affected to tolerate because the
expenditure of time in shaving might be turned with profit into the
channel of business or of worship; but his wife, noting how he stroked
the beard at intervals of meditation, judged that he was moved by
something like pride in its luxuriance. Then she chided herself for the
thought.

It was balmy spring weather, but they had taken their places at the
hearthstone from old habit when a matter of importance had to be
considered. Their two chairs were the seats of authority in the domestic
realm.

Mrs. Dill stooped, took up the turkey-wing, and gave the clean hearth a
perfunctory flick. Then she returned the wing to its place and leaned
back in her chair, gazing absently at the shining andirons.

"Well," she said, "Henrietta Parkman was in this mornin', and she told
me you'd bought the medder; but I didn't hardly believe it."

"Yes," said Myron. He spoke in rather a consequential voice, and cleared
his throat frequently in the course of talking, as if to accord his
organs a good working chance. "The deeds were passed last week, and it's
bein' recorded."

"What you goin' to do with it?"

"I bought it because it lays next to the Turnbull place, and when that
come into my hands last fall, I knew 'twas only a matter o' time till I
got the medder, too."

"Well, what you goin' to do with it?"

A tinge of anxiety was apparent in her voice, a wistful suggestiveness,
as if she could conceive of uses that would be almost too fortunate to
be hoped for. Myron hesitated. It often looked as if he judged it unwise
to answer in any haste questions concerning the domestic polity, and
Mrs. Dill was used to these periods of incubation. She had even thought
once, in a moment of illuminative comparison, that her husband seemed to
submit a bill before one branch of his mental legislature before
carrying it on to the next.

"I'm goin' to pasture my cows in it," he responded. "I shall buy in some
more