ng to the door.

"Can I smoke in this little house?"

"Cer--tainly! Sit right down and make yourself comfortable. Don't
you remember what a smoker father was?"

Red tried the different chairs with his hand. They were not a
stalwart lot. Finally he spied the home-made rocker in the corner.
"There's the lad for me," he said, drawing it out. "Got to be
kinder careful how you throw two-hundred-fifty pounds around."

"Mercy!" cried Miss Mattie, pan in hand. "Do you weigh as much as
that, Will?"

"I do," returned Red, with much satisfaction. "And there isn't
over two pounds of it fat at that."

"What a great man you have grown up to be, Will!"

Red took in a deep draught of tobacco and sent the vapor clear
across the little room.

"On the hay-scales, yes," he answered, with a sort of joking
earnestness--"but otherwise, I don't know."

The return to the old home had touched the big man deeply, and as
he leaned back in his chair there was a shade of melancholy on his
face that became it well.

Miss Mattie took in the mass of him stretched out at his ease, his
legs crossed, and the patrician cut of his face, to which the
upturned moustache gave a cavalier touch. They were good stock,
the Saunders, and the breed had not declined in the only two extant.

"He's my own cousin!" she whispered to herself, in the safety of
the kitchen. "And such a splendid looking man!" She felt a pride
of possession she had never known before. Nobody in Fairfield or
vicinity had such a cousin as that. And Miss Mattie went on
joyfully fulfilling an inherited instinct to minister to the wants
of some man. She said to herself there was some satisfaction in
cooking for somebody else. But alack-a-day, Miss Mattie's ideas of
the wants of somebody else had suffered a Fairfield change.
Nothing was done on a large scale in Fairfield. But she sat the
little cakes--lucky that she had made them yesterday--and the fried
mush, and the small pitcher of milk, and the cold ham, and the cold
biscuit on the table with a pride in the appearance of the feast.

"Supper's ready, Will," said she.

Red responded instanter. Took a look at the board and understood.
He ate the little cakes and biscuit, and said they were the durned
best he ever tasted. He also took some pot-cheese under a
misapprehension; swallowed it, and said to himself that he had been
through worse things than that. Then, when his appetite had just
begun to develop, the inr