his store for hours at a stretch, joking with the farmers who
came in. Wheeler had been a heavy drinker in his day, and was
still a heavy feeder. Bayliss was thin and dyspeptic, and a
virulent Prohibitionist; he would have liked to regulate
everybody's diet by his own feeble constitution. Even Mrs.
Wheeler, who took the men God had apportioned her for granted,
wondered how Bayliss and his father could go off to conventions
together and have a good time, since their ideas of what made a
good time were so different.

Once every few years, Mr. Wheeler bought a new suit and a dozen
stiff shirts and went back to Maine to visit his brothers and
sisters, who were very quiet, conventional people. But he was
always glad to get home to his old clothes, his big farm, his
buckboard, and Bayliss.

Mrs. Wheeler had come out from Vermont to be Principal of the
High School, when Frankfort was a frontier town and Nat Wheeler
was a prosperous bachelor. He must have fancied her for the same
reason he liked his son Bayliss, because she was so different.
There was this to be said for Nat Wheeler, that he liked every
sort of human creature; he liked good people and honest people,
and he liked rascals and hypocrites almost to the point of loving
them. If he heard that a neighbour had played a sharp trick or
done something particularly mean, he was sure to drive over to
see the man at once, as if he hadn't hitherto appreciated him.

There was a large, loafing dignity about Claude's father. He
liked to provoke others to uncouth laughter, but he never laughed
immoderately himself. In telling stories about him, people often