indisputable, and the farmers were in dismay,--nobody more so than
Farmer Weitbreck, who had miles of bottom-lands, in grain of one sort
and another, all yellow and nodding, and ready for the sickle, and
nobody but himself and his son John to swing scythe, sickle, or flail on
the place.

"Never I am caught this way anoder year," thought he, as he gazed
wearily up and down the dark, silent road; "but that does to me no goot
this time that is now."

Gustavus Weitbreck had lived so long on his Pennsylvania farm that he
even thought in English instead of in German, and, strangely enough, in
English much less broken and idiomatic than that which he spoke. But his
phraseology was the only thing about him that had changed. In modes of
feeling, habits of life, he was the same he had been forty years ago,
when he farmed a little plot of land, half wheat, half vineyard, in the
Mayence meadows in the fatherland,--slow, methodical, saving, stupid,
upright, obstinate. All these traits "Old Weitbreck," as he was called
all through the country, possessed to a degree much out of the ordinary;
and it was a combination of two of them--the obstinacy and the
savingness--which had brought him into his present predicament.

In June he had had a good laborer,--one of the best known, and eagerly
sought by every farmer in the county; a man who had never yet been
beaten in a mowing-match or a reaping. By his help the haying had been
done in not much more than two thirds the usual time; but when John
Weitbreck, like a sensible fellow, said, "Now, we would better keep Alf
on till harvest; there is plenty of odds-and-ends work about the farm he
can help at, and we won't get his like again in a hurry," his father had
cried out,--