and ninepence a day? I guess I know!"

So Eli yielded; but before his wife appeared, he had turned his back on
the sea, where the rose of dawn was fast unfolding. As he jogged
homeward, the dusty roadsides bloomed with flowers of paradise, and the
insects' dry chirp thrilled like the song of angels. He drove into the
yard just at the turning of the day, when the fragrant smoke of many a
crackling fire curls cheerily upward, in promise of the evening meal.

"What's busted?" asked Luke, swinging himself down from his load of
fodder-corn, and beginning to unharness Doll.

"Oh, nothin'," said Eli, leaping, from the wagon as if twenty years had
been taken from his bones. "I guess I'm too old for such jaunts. I hope
you didn't forgit them cats."




AFTER ALL.


"The land o' gracious!" said Mrs. Lothrop Wilson, laying down her
"drawing-in hook" on the rug stretched between two chairs in the middle
of the kitchen, and getting up to look from the window. "If there ain't
Lucindy comin' out o' the Pitmans' without a thing on her head, an' all
them little curls a-flyin'! An' the old Judge ain't cold in his grave!"

"I guess the Judge won't be troubled with cold, any to speak of, arter
this," said her husband from the window, where he sat eating his