y it would
cost into a bonnet for Charlotte, but he had not dared to propose it.
Once he had bought a little blue-figured shawl for her, and her
father had bade her return it.

"I ain't goin' to have any young sparks buyin' your clothes while you
are under my roof," he had said.

Charlotte had given the shawl back to her lover. "Father don't feel
as if I ought to take it, and I guess you'd better keep it now,
Barney," she said, with regretful tears in her eyes.

Barnabas had the blue shawl nicely folded in the bottom of his little
hair-cloth trunk, which he always kept locked.

After a quarter of a mile the stone-walls and the spray of apple
blossoms ended; there was a short stretch of new fence, and a new
cottage-house only partly done. The yard was full of lumber, and a
ladder slanted to the roof, which gleamed out with the fresh pinky
yellow of unpainted pine.

Barnabas stood before the house a few minutes, staring at it. Then he
walked around it slowly, his face upturned. Then he went in the front
door, swinging himself up over the sill, for there were no steps, and
brushing the sawdust carefully from his clothes when he was inside.
He went all over the house, climbing a ladder to the second story,
and viewing with pride the two chambers under the slant of the new
roof. He had repelled with scorn his father's suggestion that he have
a one-story instead of a story-and-a-half house. Caleb had an
inordinate horror and fear of wind, and his father, who had built the
house in which he lived, had it before him. Deborah often descanted
indignantly upon the folly of sleeping in little tucked-up bedrooms
instead of good chambers, because folks' fathers had been scared to
death of wind, and Barnabas agreed with her. If he had inherited any
of his father's and grandfather's terror of wind, he made no
manifestation of it.

In the lower story of the new cottage were two square front rooms
like those in his father's house, and behind them the great kitchen
with a bedroom out of it, and a roof of its own.

Barnabas paused at last in the kitchen, and stood quite still,
leaning against a window casement. The windows were not in, and the
spaces let in the cool air and low light. Outside was a long reach of
field sloping gently upward. In the distance, at the top of the hill,
sharply outlined against the sky, was a black angle of roof and a
great chimney. A thin column of smoke rose out of it, straight and
dark. That was whe