y the manufacturers--restored quiet to the
agitated district.

It was soon after this escapade that Jacob, the man about the place
thought himself called to some other profession than farming, and
accordingly left. As Sarah Maria remained, it was necessary to secure
a milker. This difficulty was happily surmounted about eleven o'clock
the first morning, when a man selling rustic chairs appeared upon the
scene and good-naturedly consented for the time to step within the
breach made by Jacob's disappearance.

Later on it was borne in on Steve's consciousness that he was the man
to whom Sarah Maria must look for relief. The situation was a
critical one, but Steve's was not a nature to shirk responsibilities
or shun sacrifices. Accordingly, arming himself with a hatchet and a
club, on the end of which latter instrument he suspended the milk
pail, he set out, and in this new business worked with such gentle
deliberation that at the end of an hour he could have shown a quart of
milk for his pains had not Sarah Maria testified to her respect for
the day of small things by lifting the aforementioned pail on high.

By the end of a week, however, Steve succeeded in bringing his milking
lessons to a favorable conclusion, and was ready to take his place not
among the best, it is true, but still among the milkers of the world.
He must have prosecuted his education with remarkable ardor, for his
overalls had given out in spots, and one industrious day Nannie took
it into her head to patch them. Having no suitable material at
hand--such is the misfortune of the newly wedded, with everything
whole about them--she utilized some Scotch plaid pieces left over
from a tea gown. But hardly was the patch well set than she began to
reflect that its rather conspicuous beauty would no doubt catch the
eye of Sarah Maria, and might occasion nothing less than Steve's death
if he were taken unawares when his back was turned. To extract the
patch was not to be thought of for a moment, since it was a wonderful
triumph of art for Nannie, nor could she consent, wicked though she
was, to let Steve walk forth arrayed in all its glory. A bottle of
shoe polish solved the problem and made a somewhat stiff but subdued
foundation, upon which Steve rested with more or less insecurity.

VII

One morning Nannie was out in the garden, not at work as she should
have been (she left all that to Steve), but walking around