y spin; yet they reap all the numerous soft
advantages that usually result from honest toil and skilful spinning.
How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am quite of the
opinion of the old lady in "David Copperfield," who says, "Let us have
no meandering!"

Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our neighbors
as a family, I saw no reason why I should not speak to the husband as
an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the wayside. I made
several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my penetration that
my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I resolved to put the
suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was sauntering along
on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of Fisher's sawmill, I
deliberately crossed over to address him. The brusque manner in which he
hurried away was not to be misunderstood. Of course I was not going to
force myself upon him.

It was at this time that I began to formulate uncharitable suppositions
touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some of
my choicest fruit trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to
keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe
to pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference
between _meum_ and _tuum_ does not seem to be very strongly developed in
the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.

I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister
impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I
despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road
until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was--well,
not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at
intervals, and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I saw
the lady.

After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty,
slim figure, always draped in some soft black stuff with a bit of
scarlet at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about the
house singing in her light-hearted manner, as formerly. What had
happened? Had the honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill?
I fancied she was ill, and that I detected a certain anxiety in the
husband, who spent the mornings digging solitarily in the garden and
seemed to have relinquished those long jaunts to the brow of Blue Hill,
where there is a superb view of all Norfolk County combined with sundry
venera