"Yes, you are. You are angry because I said that about landscape
gardening."

"I am not a beggar or a man who undertakes a job he is not competent
to perform, if I am poor."

"Will you undertake setting those grounds to rights, if I buy the
place?"

"Why don't you hire a regular landscape man if you have so much
money?" asked Jim rudely.

"I would rather have you. I want somebody I can work with. I have my
own ideas. I want to hire you to work with me. Will you?"

"Time enough to settle that when you've bought the place. You must go
home now. Here, take my arm. This sidewalk is an apology for one."

Lydia took the young man's arm obediently, and they began walking.

"What on earth are you going to do with all that truck you bought?"
asked Jim.

Lydia laughed. "To tell you the truth, I haven't the slightest idea,"
said she. "Pretty awful, most of it, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't give it house room."

"I won't either. I bought it, but I won't have it."

"You must take us for a pretty set of paupers, to throw away money
like that."

"Now, don't you get mad again. I did want to buy it. I never wanted
to buy things so much in my life."

"I never saw such a queer girl."

"You will know I am not queer some time, and I would tell you why
now, but--"

"Don't you tell me a thing you don't want to."

"I think I had better wait just a little. But I don't know about all
those things."

"Say, why don't you send them to missionaries out West?"

"Oh, could I?"

"Of course you can. What's to hinder?"

"When I buy that place will you help me?"

"Of course I will. Now you are talking! I'm glad to do anything like
that. I think I'd be nutty if I had to live in the same house as that
fair."

The girl burst into a lovely peal of laughter. "Exactly what I
thought all the time," said she. "I wanted to buy them; you don't
know how much; but it was like buying rabbits, and white elephants,
and--oh, I don't know! a perfect menagerie of things I couldn't bear
to live with, and I didn't see how I could give them away, and I
couldn't think of a place to throw them away." She laughed again.

Jim stopped suddenly. "Say."

"What?"

"Why, it will be an awful piece of work to pack off all those
contraptions, and it strikes me it is pretty hard on the
missionaries. There's a gravel pit down back of the Bolton place, and
if you buy it--"

"What?"

"Well, bury the fair there."

Lydia stopped short, and laughed till she