house is clean, and
every closet and bureau drawer, too; I can't start drawin' in another
rug, for I've got all the rugs I can step foot on. I dried so many
apples last year I shan't need to cut up any this season. My jelly and
preserves ain't out, and there I am; and there most of us are, in this
village, without a man to take steps for and trot 'round after! There's
just three husbands among the fifteen women scrubbin' here now, and the
rest of us is all old maids and widders. No wonder the men-folks die, or
move away, like Justin Peabody; a place with such a mess o' women-folks
ain't healthy to live in, whatever Lobelia Brewster may say."

III. Justin Peabody had once faithfully struggled with the practical
difficulties of life in Edgewood, or so he had thought, in those old
days of which Nancy Wentworth was thinking when she wiped the paint
of the Peabody pew. Work in the mills did not attract him; he had no
capital to invest in a stock of goods for store-keeping; school-teaching
offered him only a pittance; there remained then only the farm, if he
were to stay at home and keep his mother company.

"Justin don't seem to take no holt of things," said the neighbors.

"Good Heavens!" It seemed to him that there were no things to take hold
of! That was his first thought; later he grew to think that the trouble
all lay in himself, and both thoughts bred weakness.

The farm had somehow supported the family in the old Deacon's time, but
Justin seemed unable to coax a competence from the soil. He could, and
did, rise early and work late; till the earth, sow crops; but he could
not make the rain fall nor the sun shine at the times he needed them,
and the elements, however much they might seem to favor his neighbors,
seldom smiled on his enterprises. The crows liked Justin's corn better
than any other in Edgewood. It had a richness peculiar to itself, a
quality that appealed to the most jaded palate, so that it was really
worth while to fly over a mile of intervening fields and pay it the
delicate compliment of preference.

Justin could explain the attitude of caterpillars, worms, grasshoppers,
and potato-bugs toward him only by assuming that he attracted them as
the magnet in the toy boxes attracts the miniature fishes.

"Land o' liberty! look at 'em congregate!" ejaculated Jabe Slocum, when
he was called in for consultation. "Now if you'd gone in for breedin'
insecks, you could be as proud as Cuffy an' exhibit '