pring. Of
course he should want potatoes, and it was high time they were
planted. A boy arrived from the back country who had lived at the farm
the summer before,--a willing, thick-headed young person in process of
growth,--and Israel Haydon took great exception to his laziness and
inordinate appetite, and threatened so often to send him back where he
came from that only William's insistence that they had entered into an
engagement with poor Thomas, and the women's efforts toward
reconciliation, prevailed.

When sister Martin finally departed, bag and baggage, she felt as if
she were leaving her brother to be the prey of disaster. He was
sternly self-reliant, and watched her drive away down the lane with
something like a sense of relief. The offending Thomas was standing
by, expecting rebuke almost with an air of interest; but the old man
only said to him, in an apologetic and friendly way, "There! we've got
to get along a spell without any women folks, my son. I haven't heard
of any housekeeper to suit me, but we'll get along together till I
do."

"There's a great sight o' things cooked up, sir," said Thomas, with
shining eyes.

"We'll get along," repeated the old man. "I won't have you take no
liberties, but if we save the time from other things, we can manage
just as well as the women. I want you to sweep out good, night an'
morning, an' fetch me the wood an' water, an' I'll see to the
housework." There was no idea of appointing Thomas as keeper of the
pantry keys, and a shadow of foreboding darkened the lad's hopeful
countenance as the master of the house walked away slowly up the yard.

III.

It was the month of June; the trees were in full foliage; there was no
longer any look of spring in the landscape, and the air and sky
belonged to midsummer. Mrs. Israel Haydon had been dead nearly two
months.

On a Sunday afternoon the father and son sat in two old
splint-bottomed chairs just inside the wood-house, in the shade. The
wide doors were always thrown back at that time of the year, and there
was a fine view across the country. William Haydon could see his own
farm spread out like a green map; he was scanning the boundaries of
the orderly fences and fields and the stretches of woodland and
pasture. He looked away at them from time to time, or else bent over
and poked among the wood-house dust and fine chips with his
walking-stick. "There's an old buckle that I lost one day ever so many
years ago," he exc