tural existence, out of keeping, ill assorted. Tempted to know
what his silence hid, I spent an hour with him by the kitchen stove one
Sunday afternoon. His memory went easily back to the days when there
were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mills. He was of a speculative turn
of mind:

"I don't see," he said, "what makes men so crazy after gold. They're
getting worse all the time. Gold ain't got no real value. You take all
the gold out of the world and it wouldn't make no difference whatever.
You can't even make a tool to get a living with, out of gold; but just
do away with the iron, and where would you be?" And again, he
volunteered:

"I think Mr. Carnegie would have done a deal nobler if he had paid his
men a little more straight along. He wouldn't have had such a name for
himself. But don't you believe it would have been better to have paid
those men more for the work they were doing day by day than it is now to
give pensions to their families? I know what I think about the matter."

[Illustration: SUNDAY EVENING AT SILVER LAKE

The mill girls' excursion resort. A special train and 'busses run on
Sundays, and "everybody" goes.]

I asked him how he liked city life.

"Give me a farm every time," was his answer. "Once you've seen a town
you know it all. It's the same over and over again. But the country's
changing every day in the year. It's a terrible thing, being sick," he
went on. "It seems sometimes as though the pain would tear me to pieces
when I walk across the floor. I wasn't no good on the farm any more, so
my wife took a notion we better come in town and take boarders."

Thus it was with this happily balanced couple; as his side grew heavier
she took on more ballast and swung even with him. She had the quick
adaptability common to American women. During the years of farm life
religious meetings and a few neighbours had kept her in touch with the
outside world. The church and the kitchen were what she had on the farm;
the church and the kitchen were what she had in town; family life
supplemented by boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few
faithful neighbours. She had retained her activity and sympathy because
she was intelligent, because she lived with the _young_. The man could
not make himself one of another generation, so he lived alone. He had
lost his companions, the "cow kind and the sheep kind"; he had lost
control over the earth that belonged to him; he was disused; he
suffered; he pine