in' to give it to?"

"It's fer the vanilla," returned Mrs. Pawket, calmly.

Mr. Pawket put up his hand and wrung out his ear; he thought he could
not have heard aright; such aplomb, such dashing assurance as was his
wife's! His gray beard vibrated with curiosity.

"For the vanilla," the artist repeated, firmly. "I take it Willum's wife
won't be too proud to accept a notion or two fer her parlor. 'Tain't
likely that she, being so long in a furrin country, has had much chance
to go through the stores and pick out bric-a-brac. I don't know but what
she would be thankful for an ornament or so."

"Ornaments?" Mr. Pawket dwelt reverently upon the word. "Ornaments? I
dunno but what you got it right, though I wouldn't never have thought of
it myself." He leaned over the table the better to gloat upon the golden
jar. "Well," he summed up--"well, wimmen do beat all for mind-readin'.
First she sets up house-keepin', it's _ornaments_ she's goin' to hanker
fer--something fer the center-table most likely; and here you, who she
'ain't never see, stands all ready with an Everything fer her!"

A few days after the excitement produced by Willum's letter the
architect arrived. He was a tall, old-young man with the preoccupied air
of having reduced all human existence to exact diagrams. He was,
however, strangely intoxicated by the quiet and beauty of his country
surroundings. On the evening of his arrival he installed himself happily
in the spare room of the Pawkets' farm-house, acting, as Mrs. Pawket
marveled, as "if he hadn't never lived up in them classy city beehives."

Mr. Badgely, however, seemed to the farmer and his wife unnaturally
ecstatic over the ordinary manifestations of the physical universe. He
would stand for hours looking off over soft sunrise country; he would
hang over the bars by the cow-sheds, staring down the red road or
gazing pensively up at the ancient outlines of the Pawkets' homestead.
When the old farmer went up to him with knockkneed, rheumatic tread,
inquiring, "Well, how goes it?" the architect would reply:

"Oh, heavenly! Such depth! Such substance! Such integrity!"

When Mr. Pawket, fearing such brain lesions as he could not diagnose,
saw that these epithets were directed toward his own home in its
tulip-tree setting, he would range himself alongside of the architect,
eye his residence critically, and expectorate as he avowed:

"It wants roofing. Come vacation I'm goin' ter put the twins to scrapi