abor in its inexorable chores. He turned after crawling through a
wire fence and looked longingly at Jennie as she was suavely assisted into
the car by the frock-coated lawyer.

"You saw what he did?" said the colonel interrogatively, as he and his
daughter sat on the Woodruff veranda that evening. "Who taught him the
supreme wisdom of holding back his troops when they grew too wild for
attack?"

"He may lose them," said Jennie.

"Not so," said the colonel. "Individuals of the Brown Mouse type always
succeed when they find their environment. And I believe Jim has found
his."

"Well," said Jennie, "I wish his environment would find him some clothes.
It's a shame the way he has to go looking. He'd be nice-appearing if he
was dressed anyway."

"Would he?" queried the colonel. "I wonder, now! Well, Jennie, as his
oldest friend having any knowledge of clothes, I think it's up to you to
act as a committee of one on Jim's apparel."

CHAPTER XVII

A TROUBLE SHOOTER

A sudden July storm had drenched the fields and filled the swales with
water. The cultivators left the corn-fields until the next day's sun and a
night of seepage might once more fit the black soil for tillage. The
little boys rolled up their trousers and tramped home from school with the
rich mud squeezing up between their toes, thrilling with the electricity
of clean-washed nature, and the little girls rather wished they could go
barefooted, too, as, indeed, some of the more sensible did.

A lithe young man with climbers on his legs walked up a telephone pole by
the roadside to make some repairs to the wires, which had been whipped
into a "cross" by the wind of the storm and the lashing of the limbs of
the roadside trees. He had tied his horse to a post up the road, and was
running out the trouble on the line, which was plentifully in evidence
just then. Wind and lightning had played hob with the system, and the line
repairer was cheerfully profane, in the manner of his sort, glad by reason
of the fire of summer in his veins, and incensed at the forces of nature
which had brought him out through the mud to the Woodruff District to do
these piffling jobs that any of the subscribers ought to have known how to
do themselves, and none of which took more than a few minutes of his time
when he reached the seat of the difficulty.

Jim Irwin, his school out for the day, came along the muddy road with two
of his pupils, a bare-legged little boy and a ta