his way but once. We saw him then. He was lying under a
wall with his gun, watching for a chicken hawk. His wife said he'd been
there all day, since early in the morning. _She_ was chopping wood to
heat her water for tea," added Ruth with a sniff.

Neale chuckled. "Lycurgus ought to have been called 'Nimrod,'" he said.

"Why?" demanded Agnes.

"Because he is a mighty hunter. And that is really all he does take any
interest in. I bet he'd lie out under a stone wall for a week if he
thought he could get a shot at a snowbird! And he'd shoot it, too, if he
had half a chance. He never misses, they say."

"Such shiftlessness!" sniffed Ruth again. "And his wife barefooted and
his children in rags and tatters."

"That girl was a bright-looking girl," Agnes interposed. "You know--the
one with the flour-sack waist on. Oh, Neale!" she added, giggling, "you
could read in faint red marking, 'Somebody's XXXX Flour,' right across
the small of her back!"

"Poor child," sighed Ruth. "That was Sue--wasn't that her name? Sue
Billet."

"A scrawny little one with a tip-tilted nose, and running bare-legged,
though she must be twelve," said Neale. "I remember her."

"Poor child," Ruth said again.

There were other things to arouse the oldest Corner House girl's
sympathy about the Billet premises when the picnicking party arrived
there. Two lean hounds first of all charged out from under the house to
attack Tom Jonah.

"Oh!" cried Dot. "Stop them! They'll eat poor Tom Jonah up, they are so
hungry."

Tess, too, was somewhat disturbed, for the hounds seemed as savage as
bears. Tom Jonah, although slow to wrath, knew well how to acquit
himself in battle. He snapped once at each of the hounds, and they fled,
yelping.

"And serves 'em just right!" declared Agnes. "Oh! here comes Mrs.
Lycurgus."

A slatternly woman in a soiled wrapper, men's shoes on her stockingless
feet and her black, stringy hair hanging down her back, came from around
the corner of the ramshackle, tumble-down house.

"Why--ya'as; I reckon so. You ain't folks that'll build fires in our
woodlot an' leave 'em careless like. Lycurgus, he's gone up that a-way
hisself. There's a big eagle been seed up there, an' he's a notion he
might shoot it. Mebbe there's a pair on 'em. He wants ter git it,
powerful. Sue, she's gone with her pap. But I reckon you know the way?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," said Neale. Then, after he had driven on a few yards,
he said to the girls: "Say! w