d in the midst of it
all, hard-working discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on,
unable to find out what really was the matter.

And there on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and
thought, till he rose with an oath, and gave it up.

III.

It was hot and brilliant again the next morning as Douglass Radbourn
drove up the road with Lily Graham, the teacher of the school in the
little white schoolhouse. It was blazing hot, even though not yet nine
o'clock, and the young farmers plowing beside the fence looked
longingly and somewhat bitterly at Radbourn seated in a fine
top-buggy beside a beautiful creature in lace and cambric.

Very beautiful the town-bred "schoolma'am" looked to those grimy,
sweaty fellows, superb fellows physically, too, with bare red arms and
leather-colored faces. She was as if builded of the pink and white
clouds soaring far up there in the morning sky. So cool, and sweet,
and dainty.

As she came in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the
poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt
grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown,
chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote
possibility of some time in the far future "standing a chance" of
having an introduction to her, caused them to wipe them on their
trousers' leg stealthily.

Lycurgus Banks, "Ly" Banks, swore when he saw Radbourn. "That cuss
thinks he's ol' hell this morning. He don't earn his living. But he's
jest the kind of cuss to get holt of all the purty girls."

Others gazed with simple, sad wistfulness upon the slender figure,
pale, sweet face, and dark eyes of the young girl, feeling that to
have talk with such a fairy-like creature was a happiness too great to
ever be their lot. And when she had passed they went back to work with
a sigh and feeling of loss.

As for Lily, she felt a pang of pity for these people. She looked at
this peculiar form of poverty and hardship much as the fragile, tender
girl of the city looks upon the men laying a gas-main in the streets.
She felt (sympathetically) the heat and grime, and though but the
faintest idea of what it meant to wear such clothing came to her, she
shuddered. Her eyes had been opened to these things by Radbourn, who
was a well-known radical,--a law student in Rock River.

"Poor fellows!" sighed Lily, almost unconsciously. "I hate to see them
working there in the dirt an