next day, to his wife, "Delia 's got
more spunk! I should have felt like laying right down in the shafts,
in her place; but instead of that, to actually go and talk them into
letting her keep the Cal-lender place and pay for it so much a month!
And David's signed a paper to do it."

"I guess if the truth was known," said Mrs. Bennett, knitting on, "that,
come to think it over, she was more scared of David's settling back than
she was for losing the money."

"She 's got a pull on him now," said the Captain, "anyway, for if he
once agrees to a thing he always does it."

III.

No one fully knows the New England autumn who has not seen its colors on
the extreme Old Colony sea-board. There are no mountain ranges, opening
out far reaches of burning maples; but there are miles of salt-marsh,
spreading as far as the eye can reach, cut by countless creeks,
displaying a vast expanse of soft, rich shades of brown; there are
cranberry-meadows of twenty, thirty, or fifty level acres, covered with
matted vines and crimson with berries; there are deserted pastures,
bright with golden-rod and asters. And everywhere along the shores,
against the dark pine woods, are the varied reds of oaks, of blackberry
vines, of woodbine, and of sumach.

It was a bright fall afternoon; most of the boats were in, and lay near,
shore before the sail-loft door; the sails were up to dry,--for it had
been wet outside,--looking doubly white against the colors of the shore.

In the sail-loft they were telling stories.

"No, I don't think myself," said Deacon Luce, from the rocking-chair,
"that ministers always show what we call horse sense. They used to tell
a story of Parson Allen, that preached in the Old Town, in my father's
time, that pleased me. One spring the parson took a notion to raise a
pig. So he went down to Jim Barrows, that lived there handy by, and says
he, 'Mr. Barrows, I hear you have a litter of young pigs, and I should
like to have one to raise.' So Jim he got his stilyards and weighed him
out one, and the minister paid him, and Jim he sent it up. Well, the
minister kep' it some three months, and he used to go out every day and
put on his spectacles and take his scythe down from the apple-tree and
mow pig-weed for him, and he bought corn-meal to feed him up with, and
one way and another he laid out a good deal on him. The pig fattened
well, but the whole incessant time he was either rooting out and gitting
into the garden, o