re, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.

"Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves," she
said, "to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man
would cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's
got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we
gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way."

"I suppose every little does help," commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. "I tell you what let's
do!" he exclaimed. "Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long
walk, way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they
float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give
you almost mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a
sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees
all about it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--"

"You forget," put in Mrs. Ware,--"those trustees are coming at eleven."

"So they are!" assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
and, turning, went indoors.

He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
Finally he did take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in
the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
half closed themselves in si