"So they are!" assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
and, turning, went indoors.

He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
Finally he did take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in
the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
half closed themselves in sign of revery.

This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were
going to dislike so much.

The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of "milkers" coming
lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with