ere is about it."

"The fish in the river, too, I suppose," said she, stepping to the
fence, and peering over the river brink.

"I reckon you won't get fish enough to get sick on them," said a voice
near; and, Mr. Jones emerged from a clump of bushes, his gun on his
shoulder.

"This is our neighbor," said the minister; "my wife, Mr. Jones."

"Looking up a cage to put your bird in?" asked the squatter.

The minister replied affirmatively.

"You found that eighty-acre lot just as I told ye--didn't ye?" he
asked.

"Precisely."

"And did your 'brother Smith' give it up like a Christian?" he
pursued.

"I suppose I am the proprietor of it now," said the minister,
good-naturedly.

"And he didn't charge you anything for giving up what was not his--did
he?"

"No," said the missionary; "he did not charge me anything for the
claim, although he seemed to think it right that I should give him
something for the improvements."

"Improvements! Yes, I suppose he expects some pay for the saw logs he
stole from the lot, while he had acres on acres of timber of his own.
It's no more'n fair that a Christian man should be paid for the lumber
he plunders from other folks' land. You paid him for that, of
course?"

"O, no," replied Mr. Payson; "he didn't bring in his bill for that. He
had cleared and fenced the ten-acre piece over the river, and he said
he didn't wish to lose his labor."

"Well," said Mr. Jones, almost fiercely, "I wasn't aware, elder, that
you employed him to do that little job; I thought that was done last
year, 'fore we knew anything 'bout you in these parts."

"Yes, yes," said the missionary, coloring.

"And I rather think," he continued, "that he got his pay for his work,
as he expected to, in what he took from the land. I never saw better
corn and wheat, let alone the potatoes and the pumpkins that he raised
on that river bottom; and as to the rails, they belong where he took
them from, that eighty-acre lot that he robbed and impoverished,
tilling the soil in the summer, and cutting down the best trees in the
winter, and working what he didn't care about into rails; and now he
turns around,--after having skimmed your milk, when he had plenty of
his own,--and tells you, as a Christian brother, that you orter pay
him for taking off the cream, and making butter of it for his own
table. May I ask what he charged you for the operation?"

"He asked," said the minister, "eighty dollars, but concluded to t