at your option, for gingham dresses and cowhide shoes, of your
selection. If I were a boy, I'd work three years more and then I
would be given two hundred acres of land, have a house and barn
built for me, and a start of stock given me, as every boy in this
family has had at twenty-one."

"A man is a man! He founds a family, he runs the Government! It
is a different matter," said Mrs. Bates.

"It surely is; in this family. But I think, even with us, a man
would have rather a difficult proposition on his hands to found a
family without a woman; or to run the Government either."

"All right! Go on to Adam and see what you get."

"I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that Nancy Ellen gets
dinner, anyway," said Kate as she passed through the door and
followed the long path to the gate, from there walking beside the
road in the direction of her brother's home. There were many
horses in the pasture and single and double buggies in the barn;
but it never occurred to Kate that she might ride: it was
Sunday and the horses were resting. So she followed the path
beside the fences, rounded the corner of the church and went on
her way with the text from which the pastor was preaching,
hammering in her brain. She became so absorbed in thought that
she scarcely saw the footpath she followed, while June flowered,
and perfumed, and sang all around her.

She was so intent upon the words she had heard that her feet
unconsciously followed a well-defined branch from the main path