fa'tha."
"Why, what's the matta?" demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.
The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include
Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,
"Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?"
"Seen 'em, too," answered Lander, comprehensively.
"Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly. He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's
a do-everything. I guess it's about as bad." Lander glimmered back at the
man, but did not speak.
"Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from," the farmer
began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for
a moment, interrupted:
"Yes, Yes! That's what the gul said."
"But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's
goin' in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin' lathe,
and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for fence-posts,
and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the place bunt
down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for wood, the whole
winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks. Seems to think that
the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's dry, is goin' to cure
him, and he can't git too much of it."
"Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!" cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband
had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of
controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.
"I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's got,
and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up. But he don't seem to
be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow. Wife takes in
sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last season. Whole
fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do everything."
The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but
the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which
began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the
man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited the
father's smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and
one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They were
all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they
almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved
little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very
much to her
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