as if to get up to open it, and then sat down again, her face
first flushed and then pale. Her mother opened the door, and there stood
Buckner Gowdy. He came in, with his easy politeness and sat down among
us like an old friend.

"I didn't know you had company," said he; "but I now remember that Mr.
Vandemark is an old friend."

He always called me Mr. Vandemark, because, I guess, I owned seven
hundred and twenty acres of land, and was not all mortgaged up. Virginia
told me afterward, that where they came from people who owned so much
land were the quality, and were treated more respectfully than the
poor whites.

"Yes, sir," said Old Man Fewkes, "Jake is the onliest real old friend
we got hereabouts."

Gowdy took me into the conversation, but he sat where he could look at
Rowena. He seemed to be carrying on a silent conversation with her with
his eyes, while he talked to me, looking into my eyes a good deal too,
and stooping toward me in that intimate, confidential way of his. When I
told him that I thought he was not getting as much done as he ought to
with all the hands he had, he said nobody knew it better than he; but
could I suggest any remedy? Now on the canal, we had to organize our
work, and I had seen a lot of public labor done between Albany and
Buffalo; so I had my ideas as to people's getting in one another's way.
I told him that his men were working in too large gangs, as I looked at
it. Where he had twenty breaking-teams following one another, if one
broke his plow, or ran on a boulder and had to file it, the whole gang
had to stop for him, or run around him and make a balk in the work. I
thought it would be better to have not more than two or three breaking
on the same "land," and then they would not be so much in one another's
way, and wouldn't have so good an excuse for stopping and having jumping
matches and boxing bouts and story-tellings. Then their work could be
compared, they could be made to work against one another in a kind of
competition, and the bad ones could be weeded out. It would be the same
with corn-plowing, and some other work.

"There's sense in that, sir," he said, after thinking it over. "You see,
Mr. Vandemark, my days of honest industry are of very recent date. Thank
you for the suggestion, sir."

I got up to leave. Rowena's father was pulling off his boots, which
with us then, was the signal that he was going to bed. If I stayed after
that alone with Rowena, it was a sign