on the table," she called. "I guess you'll have to take two pails. They
ain't very big."

At length, the two teams were ready, and Eli mounted to his place,
where he looked very slender beside his towering mate. The hired man
stood leaning on the pump, chewing a bit of straw, and the cats rubbed
against his legs, with tails like banners; they were all impressed by a
sense of the unusual.

"Well, good-by, Luke," Mrs. Pike called, over her shoulder; and Eli
gave the man a solemn nod, gathered up the reins, and drove out of the
yard. Just outside the gate, he pulled up.

"Whoa!" he called, and Luke lounged forward. "Don't you forgit them
cats! Git up, Doll!" And this time, they were gone.

For the first ten miles of the way, familiar in being the road to
market, Eli was placidly cheerful. The sense that he was going to do
some strange deed, to step into an unknown country, dropped away from
him, and he chatted, in his intermittent, serious fashion, of the crops
and the lay of the land.

"Pretty bad job up along here, ain't it, father?" called Sereno, as
they passed a sterile pasture where two plodding men and a yoke of oxen
were redeeming the soil from its rocky fetters.

"There's a good deal o' pastur', in some places, that ain't fit for
nothin' but to hold the world together," returned Eli; and then he was
silent, his eyes fixed on Doll's eloquent ears, his mouth working a
little. For this progress through a less desirable stratum of life