ther's presence. I have a few letters to finish.
I'll just step into the outer office and be ready to start when you've
heard the history lecture." He turned to the children, who were tapping
on the typewriter. "Look here, kids, you'd be better off where you won't
break anything. Get along with you out into the mill-yard and play on
the lumber-piles, why don't you? Paul, you see if you can tell yellow
birch from oak this time!"

He and the children beat a retreat together into the outer office, where
he bent over Arthur's desk and began to dictate in a low voice,
catching, as he did so, an occasional rotund phrase from the
disquisition in the other room. ". . . the glorious spirit of manly
independence of the Green Mountain Boys . . ."

To himself Neale thought, "He'd call it bolshevism if he met it today
. . ."

". . . second building erected in the new settlement, 1766, as a
fort. . . . No, _no_, Mr. Marsh, _not_ against the Indians! Our early
settlers _here_ never had any trouble with the Indians."

Neale laughed to himself at the clergyman's resentment of any ignorance
of any detail of Ashley's unimportant history.

". . . as a fort against the York State men in the land-grant quarrels
with New Hampshire and New York, before the Revolution." Neale, smiling
inwardly, bet himself a nickel that neither of the two strangers had
ever heard of the Vermont land-grant quarrels, and found himself vastly
tickled by the profound silence they kept on the subject. They were
evidently scared to death of starting old Bayweather off on another
line. They were safe enough, if they only knew it. It was inconceivable
to Mr. Bayweather that any grown person should not know all about early
Vermont history.

At this point Marise came out of the office, her face between laughter
and exasperation. She clasped her hands together and said, "Can't you do
_any_thing?"

"In a minute," he told her. "I'll just finish these two letters and then
I'll go and break him off short."

Marise went on to the accountant's desk, to ask about his wife, who sang
in her winter chorus.

He dictated rapidly: "No more contracts will go out to you if this
stripping of the mountain-land continues. Our original contract has in
it the clause which I always insist on, that trees smaller than six
inches through the butt shall not be cut. You will please give your
choppers definite orders on this point, and understand that logs under
the specified size will