n I get good and ready, and not before," it seems to say. Other
places the thinner snow has departed and left behind it mud that seizes
upon your overshoe with an "Oh, what's your rush?" In the middle of
the road it lies as smooth as pancake-batter. A load of building stone
stalls, and people gather on the sidewalk to tell the teamster quietly
and unostentatiously that he ought to have had more sense than to pile
it on like that with the roads the way they are. Every time the cruel
whip comes down and the horses dance under it, the women peering out of
the front windows wince, and cluck "Tchk! Ain't it terrible? He ought
to be arrested." This way and that the team turns and tugs, but all in
vain. Somebody puts on his rubber boots and wades out to help, fearing
not the muddy spokes. Yo hee! Yo hee! No use. He talks it over with the
teamster. You can hear him say: "Well, suit yourself. If you want to
stay here all night."

And then the women exult: "Goody! Goody! Serves him right. Now he has to
take off some of the stone. Lazy man's load!"

The mother of children flies to the back-door when school lets out.
"Don't you come in here with all that mud!" she squalls excitedly. "Look
at you! A peck o' dirt on each foot. Right in my nice clean kitchen that
I just scrubbed. Go 'long now and clean your shoes. Go 'long, I tell
you. Slave and slave for you and that's all the thanks I get. You'd
keep the place looking like a hogpen, if I wasn't at you all the time. I
never saw such young ones since the day I was made. Never. Whoopin' and
hollerin' and trackin' in and out. It's enough to drive a body crazy."

(Don't you care. It's just her talk. If it isn't one thing it's another,
cleaning your shoes, or combing your hair, or brushing your clothes, or
using your handkerchief, or shutting the door softly, or holding your
spoon with your fingers and not in your fist, or keeping your finger out
of your glass when you drink--something the whole blessed time. Forever
and eternally picking at a fellow about something. And saying the same
thing over and over so many times. That's the worst of it!)

Pap and mother read over the seed catalogues, all about "warm, light
soils," and "hardy annuals," and "sow in drills four inches apart." It
kind of hurries things along when you do that. In the south window of
the kitchen is a box full of black dirt in which will you look out what
you're doing? Little more and you'd have upset it. There are tom