that they have to blanket the apple-trees while the
fruit is setting; and they kill off our Colorado bugs by turning them
loose, one at a time, on the potato-patches: the bug starves to death
in forty-eight hours. But you've got plenty of schoolhouses, doctor; it
does beat all, about the schoolhouses. And it's an awful pity that there
are no children to go to school in them. Why, of course the people go
West as fast as they can, but they ought to be helped; the Government
ought to do something. They're good people; make first-rate citizens
when you get them waked up, out there. But they ought all to be got
away, and let somebody run New England' as a summer resort. It's pretty,
and it's cool and pleasant, and the fishing is excellent; milk, eggs,
and all kinds of berries and historical associations on the premises;
and it could be made very attractive three months of the year; but my
goodness! you oughtn't to ask anybody to live here. You come out with
us, doctor, and see that country, and you'll know what I mean."

His boasts were always uttered with a wan, lack-lustre irony, as if
he were burlesquing the conventional Western brag and enjoying the
mystifications of his listener, whose feeble sense of humor often failed
to seize his intention, and to whom any depreciation of New England was
naturally unintelligible. She had not come to her final liking for him
without a season of serious misgiving, but after that she rested
in peace upon what every one knowing him felt to be his essential
neighborliness. Her wonder had then come to be how he could marry
Louise, when they sat together on the seaward piazza, and he poured out
his easy talk, unwearied and unwearying, while, with one long, lank leg
crossed upon the other, he swung his unblacked, thin-soled boot to and
fro.

"Well, he was this kind of a fellow: When we were in Switzerland, he was
always climbing some mountain or other. They could n't have hired me to
climb one of their mountains if they'd given me all their scenery, and
thrown their goitres in. I used to tell him that the side of a house was
good enough for me. But nothing but the tallest mountains would do him;
and one day when he was up there on the comb of the roof somewhere, tied
with a rope round his waist to the guide and a Frenchman, the guide's
foot slipped, and he commenced going down. The Frenchman was just going
to cut the rope and let the guide play it alone; but he knocked the
knife out of his