"

Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back
on old pleasures and old friends.

"Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in
Frankfort?"

"I think so, Mother," he answered a little impatiently. "I told
her she could attend to it when she was in town some day."

"Of course," his mother persevered, "some of the programs are not
very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of
what we have."

He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that.
His horses stopped at the water tank. "Don't wait for me. I'll be
along in a minute." Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled.
"Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give
me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool
the other."

She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost
disappeared. "I thought I was smart that time!"

It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to
get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.

While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a
page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her
they were all photographs,--she knew no other way of making a
picture.

"Mr. Claude," she asked, "how comes it all them Germans is such
ugly lookin' people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here
ain't ugly lookin'."

Claude put her off indulgently. "Maybe it's the ugly ones that
are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our
neighbours."

"Then why don't they make their soldiers stay home, an' not go
breakin' other people's things, an' turnin' 'em out of their
houses," she muttered indignantly. "They say little babies was
born out in the snow last winter, an' no fires for their mudders
nor nothin'. 'Deed, Mr. Claude, it wasn't like that in our war;
the soldiers didn't do nothin' to the women an' chillun. Many a
time our house was full of Northern soldiers, an' they never so
much as broke a piece of my mudder's chiney."

"You'll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must
have my dinner and get back to work. If we don't get our wheat
in, those people over there won't have anything to eat, you
know."

The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she
could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over
photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages,
things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry
that u