ealed the rod behind her. Her private intention was to wait
for the third knock, and then open suddenly, with the deadly resolve to
teach us what we were about--a mental reservation being made in the case
of Baby Louis, who (if the knocker turned out to be he) must obviously
have been put up to it.

The third knock fell. Aunt Jen leaped upon the door-handle. Bolts
creaked and shot back, but swollen by many rainy seasons, the door held
stoutly as is the wont of farm front doors. Then suddenly it gave way
and Aunt Jen staggered back against the wall, swept away by the energy
of her own effort. The wand fell from her hand, and she stood with the
inner door handle still clutched in nervous fingers before a slight
dapper man in a shiny brown coat, double-breasted and closely buttoned,
even on this broiling day--while the strident "_weesp-weesp_" of brother
Tom down in the meadow, sharpening his scythe with a newly fill
"strake," made a keen top-note to the mood of summer.

"Mr. Poole," said the slim man, uncovering and saluting obsequiously,
and then seeing that my aunt rested dumb-stricken, the rod which had
been in pickle fallen to the floor behind her, he added with a little
mincing smile and a kind of affected heel-and-toe dandling of his body,
"I am Mr. Wrighton Poole, of the firm of Smart, Poole, and Smart of
Dumfries."

CHAPTER XIX

LOADED-PISTOL POLLIXFEN

Now Aunt Jen's opinion of lawyers was derived from two sources,
observation and a belief in the direct inspiration of two lines of Dr.
Watts, his hymns.

In other words, she had noticed that lawyers sat much in their offices,
twiddling with papers, and that they never went haymaking nor stood
erect in carts dumping manure on the autumnal fields. So two lines of
Dr. Watts, applicable for such as they, and indeed every one not so
aggressively active as herself, were calculated to settle the case of
Mr. Wrighton Poole.

"Satan finds some mischief
For idle hands to do."

Indeed, I had heard of them more than once myself, when she caught me
lying long and lazy in the depths of a haymow with a book under my nose.

At any rate Aunt Jen suspected this Mr. Poole at once. But so she would
the Lord Chancellor of England himself, for the good reason that by
choice and custom he sat on a woolsack!

"I'd woolsack him!" Aunt Jen had cried when this fact was first brought
to her notice; "I'd make him get up pretty quick and earn his living if
he was m