was telling her of his life.

"I don't see how I endured it as long as I did," he went on. "It was
nothing but work, work, and dust or mud the whole year round; farm-life,
especially on a dairy farm, is slavery."

"Yes," she agreed, "that is true. Father was a carpenter, and I've
always lived here; but we have people who are farmers, and I know how it
is with them."

"Why, when I think of it now it makes me crawl! To think of getting up
in the morning before daylight, and going out to the barn to do chores,
to get ready to go into the field to work! Working, wasting y'r life on
dirt. Waiting and tending on cows seven hundred times a year. Goin'
round and round in a circle, and never getting out. You needn't talk to
me of the poetry of a farmer's life."

"It's just the same for us women," she corroborated. "Think of us going
around the house day after day, and doing just the same things over an'
over, year after year! That's the whole of most women's lives.
Dishwashing almost drives me crazy."

"I know it," said Albert; "but somebody has t' do it. And if a fellow's
folks are workin' hard, why, of course he can't lay around and study.
They're not to blame. I don't know that anybody's to blame."

"I don't suppose anybody is, but it makes me sad to see mother going
around as she does, day after day. She won't let me do as much as I
would." The girl looked at her slender hands. "You see, I'm not very
strong. It makes my heart ache to see her going around in that quiet,
patient way; she's so good."

"I know, I know! I've felt just like that about my mother and father,
too."

There was a long pause, full of deep feeling, and then the girl
continued in a low, hesitating voice:

"Mother's had an awful hard time since father died. We had to go to
keeping boarders, which was hard--very hard for mother." The boy felt a
sympathetic lump in his throat as the girl went on again: "But she
doesn't complain, and she didn't want me to come home from school; but
of course I couldn't do anything else."

It didn't occur to either of them that any other course was open, nor
that there was any special heroism or self-sacrifice in the act; it was
simply _right_.

"Well, I'm not going to drudge all my life," said Albert, at last. "I
know it's kind o' selfish, but I can't live on a farm. I've made up my
mind to study law and enter the bar. Lawyers manage to get hold of
enough to live on decently, and that's more than you can say of