n, "after dinner
I'm goin' to take you children across the street to see that parrot."

III

RURAL INSURANCE

The Story of a Wayside Halt

By CLOTILDE GRAVES

EXHAUSTED by the effort involved in keeping the thermometer of the
closing day of August at an altitude intolerable to the human kind and
irksome to the brute, a large, red-hot sun was languidly sinking beyond
an extensive belt of dusky-brown elms fringing the western boundary of a
seventy acre expanse of stubbles diagonally traversed by a parish
right-of-way leading from the village of Bensley to the village of
Dorton Ware. A knee-deep crop of grasses, flattened by the passage of
the harvest wains, clothed this strip of everyman's land, and a narrow
footpath divided the grass down the middle, as a parting divides hair.

A snorting sound, which, accompanied by a terrific clatter of old iron
and the crunching of road-mendings, had been steadily growing from
distant to near, and from loud to deafening, now reached a pitch of
utter indescribability; and as a large splay-wheeled, tall-funneled,
plowing engine rolled off the Bensley highroad and lumbered in upon the
right-of-way, the powerful bouquet of hot lubricating oil nullified all
other smells, and the atmosphere became opaque to the point of solidity.
As the dust began to settle it was possible to observe that attached to
the locomotive was a square, solid, wooden van, the movable residence of
the stoker, the engineer, and an apprentice; that a Powler cultivator, a
fearsome piece of mechanism, apparently composed of second-hand anchors,
chain-cables, and motor driving-wheels, was coupled to the back of the
van, and that a bright green water-cart brought up the rear. Upon the
rotund barrel of this water-cart rode a boy.

The plowing-engine came to a standstill, the boy got down from the
water-cart and uncoupled the locomotive from the living-van. During the
operations, though the boy received many verbal buffets from both his
superiors, it was curiously noticeable that the engineer and stoker,
while plainly egging one another on to wreak physical retribution upon
the body of the neophyte, studiously refrained from personally
administering it.

"Hook off, can't ye, hook off!" commanded the engineer. "A 'ead like a
dumpling, that boy 'as!" he commented to the stoker, as Billy wrought
like a grimy goblin at the appointed task.

"A clout on the side of it 'ud do 'im good!" pronounced the stoker, wh