my
hands full, I tell you."

"Is Old Grumpy bad to-day?" Caroline inquired.

"Bad? Child, that old fellow is just about the worst I ever saw, and
I've seen plenty. What's on his mind the Lord knows, but it's a
lesson to us all to keep our tempers and not have secret thoughts
preying on us night and day! Just now he told me the truth for once.
'I'm so worried I can't digest, Luella,' he says to me, 'and I
digest so damnably that it's enough to worry an archangel!' There--I
shouldn't 'a' said that before you, but--"

"Oh, I know 'damn,' Luella," Caroline assured her, "and it isn't as
if you said it purposely, anyway; you just repeated it. It makes all
the difference."

"I guess it does," Luella assented, "s'long's you understand it. But
then, you understand everything, more or less, 'seems to me. Where
you picked it all up at your age--"

"What's that, Luella? Who is talking out there? What's going on
_now_ behind my back?"

A petulant and gray-haired gentleman rushed out at them, very much
like a wiry Scotch terrier, and glared fiercely at Caroline and
Henry D. Thoreau.

"Nothin's goin' on behind your back that I know of, Mr. Wortley,"
Luella returned composedly. "This little girl comes up to see me
every once 'n a while--I do washing for her mother at one of the
cottages--and we were just talkin' back and forth, that's all."

"You fried that liver!" the gentleman burst forth abruptly, "you
know you fried it, Luella! I might as well have eaten a shingle off
the cottage--it's killing me! Ugh! As if I hadn't enough to bear
without being murdered with fried liver!"

"I do' know what you've got to bear, Mr. Wortley," and Luella
gathered her apron full of kindlings, "but you needn't add fried
liver to it, 'cause it was broiled."

"Never!" exploded the fiery gentleman.

"I'd ought to know," said Luella firmly, "I had the grid-iron to
wash."

"As for children," he veered off again, "you couldn't have poorer
company. Think what they'll grow into--think!"

"Some don't turn out so bad," she reminded him, starting toward the
house.

"Ah, but when are you going to decide that they _have_ 'turned
out'?" he demanded, trotting angrily beside her, "tell me that, will
you? Perhaps you imagine that when they're of age, legally men and
women, and you've managed to keep 'em out of the State Reform School
up to then, you're justified in thinking they've 'turned out'? Hey?"

"Oh, now, I wouldn't go on so about the State