lt to maintain, especially late at
night.

On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the
house, I could not refrain from saying, with some edge, "I never wanted to
keep pigs anyway."

"Who says we're keeping them?" remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and
laughed.

"You needn't think I'm laughing because you said anything specially
funny," I said. "It's only because I'm tired enough to laugh at anything."

The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had
worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan
to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I
finally broke out, "Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!"

"I'll have the thing together now in a jiffy," said Jonathan.

"Jiffy! There's no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night," I
snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked. "Why can't we
find a really simple way of living? This isn't simple. It's highly complex
and very difficult."

"You cut those washers very well," suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I
was not prepared to be soothed.

"It was hateful work, though. Now, look what we've done this evening!
We've shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven
that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dog's
chain, and now we've fixed the pump--and it won't stay fixed at that!"

"Fair evening's work," murmured Jonathan as he rapidly assembled the pump.

"Yes, as work. But all I mean is--it isn't _simple_. Farm life has a
reputation for simplicity that I begin to think is overdone. It doesn't
seem to me that my evening has been any more simple than if we had dressed
for dinner and gone to the opera or played bridge. In fact, at this
distance, that, compared with this, has the simplicity of a--I don't know
what!"

"I like your climaxes," said Jonathan, and we both laughed. "There! I'm
done. Now suppose we go, in our simple way, and lock up the barns and
chicken-houses."

* * * * *

And so the evenings came and went, each offering a prospect of fair and
quiet things--books and firelight and moonlight and talk; many in
retrospect full of things quite different--drains and latches and
fledglings and cows and pigs. Many, but not all. For the evenings did now
and then come when the pump ceased from troubling and the "critters" were
at rest. Evenings when we