ere being
harvested. Amos Burr, with a peanut "share" attached to the plough, was
separating the yellowed plants from the ripe nuts underground, and
Nicholas, lifting the roots upon a pitchfork, shook them free from earth
and threw them over the pointed staves which were the final supports of
the "shocks." A negro hand went before him, driving the sticks into the
sandy soil.

"I should say you might count on forty bushels an acre," remarked
Nicholas cheerfully, as he lifted a detached root from a broken hill.
"It's a fair yield, isn't it?"

Amos Burr shook his head and muttered that there was "no tellin'.
Peanuts air one of the things thar's no countin' on," he added. "Wheat
air another, corn air another, oats air another."

"Life is another," concluded Nicholas lightly. "Still we live and still
we raise wheat and oats and corn. But I wish you'd look into market
gardening. I believe it would pay you better."

"'Tain't no use," returned Amos, with his accustomed pessimism. "'Tain't
no use my plantin' as long as the government ain't goin' to move, nohow.
It's been promisin' to help the farmer ever since the war, an' it ain't
done nothin' for him yet but tax him."

But Nicholas, to avoid his father's political drift, fell to talking
with one of the negro workers.

Several hours later, when he had changed his farm clothes, he joined
Eugenia in the pasture and walked with her to Battle Hall, where the
general received him with ready, if condescending, hospitality. Eugenia
had instructed her family upon the changed conditions of Nicholas's
social standing, but her logic was powerless to convince her father
that Amos Burr's son was any better than Amos Burr had been before him.

"Pish! Pish!" he exclaimed testily, "the boy's not a lawyer--only
gentlemen belong to the bar, but there's nobody too high or too low to
be a farmer. Polite to him? Did you ever see me impolite in my own house
even to a chimney sweep?"

"I never saw a chimney sweep in your own house," Eugenia retorted,
whereupon he pinched her cheek and accused her of "making fun of her old
father."

Now, when Nicholas sat down on one of the long green benches on the
porch, the general conversed with him as he conversed with the chicken
sellers who came of an afternoon to receive payment for their luckless
fowls.

"This'll be a busy season for you," he observed cheerfully, in the
slightly elevated voice in which he addressed his inferiors. "You'll be
cutt