at a summer hotel where the rates are exorbitant, instantly laid by her
own knitting and questioned him soothingly. It seemed to be a simple
difficulty. Sandy had reached the point where a sweater must have a neck,
and had forgotten his instructions. Cordially the woman aided him to
subtract fourteen from two hundred and sixty-two and then to ascertain
that one hundred and twenty-four would be precisely half of the
remainder. It was all being done, as I have remarked, with the gentlest
considering kindness, with no hint of that bitterness which the neophyte
had shown himself to be fearing in the lady. Was she not kindness itself?
Was she not, in truth, just a shade too kind? Surely there was a purr
to her voice, odd, unwonted; and surely her pupil already cringed under
a lash that impended.

Yet this visible strain, it seemed, had not to do with knitted garments.
Ma Pettengill praised the knitting of Sandy; praised it to me and praised
it to him. Of course her remark that he seemed to be a born knitter and
ought to devote his whole time to it might have seemed invidious to a
sensitive cowman, yet it was uttered with flawless geniality. But when
Sandy, being set right, would have taken his work and retired, as was
plainly his eager wish, his mentor said she would knit two of the new
short rows herself, just to make sure. And while she knitted these two
rows she talked. She knitted them quickly, though the time must have
seemed to Sandy much longer than it was.

"Here stands the greatest original humorist in Kulanche County," said
the lady, with no longer a purring note in her voice. She boomed the
announcement. Sandy, drooping above her, painfully wore the affectation
of counting each stitch of the flashing needles. "And practical jokes--my
sakes alive! He can think of the funniest jokes to put up on poor,
unsuspecting people! Yes, sir; got a genius for it. And witty! Of