enough wood to last all summer." I went down there.
"What is your name?" I asked.

"William--William Deegan."

"Well, William, you seem to understand work. Come up to dinner
presently, and if you want to go on cutting this afternoon I'll pay you
for it."

He came, and there was nothing the matter with his appetite this time.
Ham and eggs, potatoes, beans, corn-bread, pie--whatever came went.
William was the apostle of the clean plate. Reflecting somewhat on the
matter, I reached the conclusion (and it was justified by later events)
that William had perhaps been entertaining himself with friends the
night before--during several nights before, I judge--and was suffering
from temporary reaction when he had appeared on our horizon. Coffee and
a nap had restored him. He was quick on recovery, I will say that.

You never saw such a hole in a wood-pile as he made that afternoon. When
I went down to settle with him and announce supper he was still in full
swing, apparently intending to go on all night.

"William," I said, "you're a boss hand with an ax."

"Well, sur," said William, his Celtic timbre pitched to the sky, "if I
could be shtayin' a day or two longer I'd finish the job fer ye."

Was this a proposition to rob the house and murder us in our beds? I
looked at the wood-pile and at William. There was something about their
intimate relations that had an honest look. I remembered the extensive
garden that would have to be hoed in July.

"Where would you go from here?" I said.

"I don't know, sur. I'll be lookin' fer a job."

"Do you understand gardening and taking care of a horse and cow?"

"Yes, sur, I do that."

I had an impulse to ask him about his last job, but I checked it. It was
a question that could lead to embarrassment. I would accept him on his
demonstration, or not at all.

"So you want a summer job, at general farm-work?"

"Yes, sur, I do."

"Well, William, you've found one, right here."

Even after the lapse of a dozen years I cannot write of William without
a tugging at the heart. We never knew his antecedents--never knew where
behind the sky-line he had been concealed all those years before that
morning when he appeared, pale and unannounced, at the well. We got the
impression, as time passed, that he had once been married and that he
had at some time been somewhere on a peach-farm. With the exception of
certain brief intervals--of which I may speak later--he remained with us
three years