for himself, and did not say anything about them. He did what Sewell
bade him do in admiring this thing or that; but if he had been an
Indian he could not have regarded them with a greater reticence.
Sewell made him sit down from time to time, but in a sitting posture
Barker's silence became so deathlike that Sewell hastened to get him
on his legs again, and to walk him about from one point to another,
as if to keep life in him. At the end of one of these otherwise
aimless excursions Mrs. Sewell appeared, and infused a gleam of hope
into her husband's breast. Apparently she brought none to Barker; or
perhaps he did not conceive it polite to show any sort of liveliness
before a lady. He did what he could with the hand she gave him to
shake, and answered the brief questions she put to him about his
family to precisely the same effect as he had already reported its
condition to Sewell.

"Dinner's ready now," said Mrs. Sewell, for all comment. She left
the expansiveness of sympathy and gratulation to her husband on most
occasions, and on this she felt that she had less than the usual
obligation to make polite conversation. Her two children came
downstairs after her, and as she unfolded her napkin across her lap
after grace she said, "This is my son, Alfred, Mr. Barker; and this
is Edith." Barker took the acquaintance offered in silence, the
young Sewells smiled with the wise kindliness of children taught to
be good to all manner of strange guests, and the girl cumbered the
helpless country boy with offers of different dishes.

Mr. Sewell as he cut at the roast beef lengthwise, being denied by
his wife a pantomimic prayer to be allowed to cut it crosswise,
tried to make talk with Barker about the weather at Willoughby
Pastures. It had been a very dry summer, and he asked if the fall