ce in a while."

"What for?"

"What for? Why, to keep down people's stomach; take off a slice of
their pride."

"Mother! do you think eating and people's pride have anything to do
with each other?"

"I guess I do! I tell you, fasting is as good as whipping to take down
a child's stomach; let 'em get real thin and empty, and they'll come
down and be as meek as Moses. Folks ain't different from children."

"You never tried that with me, mother," said Diana, half laughing.

"Your father always let you have your own way. I could ha' managed
_you_, I guess; but your father and you was too much at once. Come,
Diana do--get up and go off and get dressed, or something."

But she sat still, letting the soft June air woo her, and the scents of
flower and field hold some subtle communion with her. There was a
certain hidden harmony between her and them; and yet they stirred her
somehow uneasily.

"I wonder," she said after a few minutes' silence, "what a nobleman's
park is like?"

The mother stood still again in the middle of the kitchen.

"A park!"

"Yes. It must be something beautiful; and yet I cannot think how it
could be prettier than this."

"Than what?" said her mother impatiently.

"Just all this. All this country; and the hayfields, and the
cornfields, and the hills."

"A park!" her mother repeated. "I saw a 'park' once, when I was down to
New York; you wouldn't want to see it twice. A homely little mite of a
green yard, with a big white house in the middle of it; and homely
enough _that_ was too. It might do very well for the city folks; but
the land knows I'd be sorry enough to live there. What's putting parks
in your head?"

But the daughter did not answer, and the mother stood still and looked
at her, with perhaps an inscrutable bit of pride and delight behind her
hard features. It never came out.

"Diana, do you calculate to be ready for the sewin' meetin'?"

"Yes, mother."

"Since they must come, we may as well make 'em welcome; and they won't
think it, if you meet 'em in your kitchen dress. Is the new minister
comin', do you s'pose?"

"I don't know if anybody has told him."

"Somebody had ought to. It won't be much of a meetin' without the
minister; and it 'ud give him a good chance to get acquainted. Mr.
Hardenburgh used to like to come."

"The new man doesn't look much like Mr. Hardenburgh."

"It'll be a savin' in biscuits, if he ain't."

"I used to like to see Mr. Hardenburgh eat,