wife and himself. But alas! though possessed of an
unusually tender heart and of unusually fine intuitions, yet
occasionally Steve was a man, pure and simple, and this was one of the
occasions. Just as Nannie was sitting down to dinner he said:

"Nannie, I've been wondering what is it that makes you act so?"

"I don't act!" stormed Nannie, who was ablaze in a minute. "It's you
who act! You treat me as if I were a two-year-old child!" Then, in a
gust of changed emotion, she took a step nearer to him and cried out:

"I don't want to be bad, but"--she turned now toward the door, and as
she went out looked backward over her shoulder and added impishly--"I
am, and I'm 'fraid I'm going to be."

And off she went--off to the barn, and the next moment there was a
lonely, yearning child-wife sobbing her heart out on Sarah Maria's
neck.

Evidently there was a bond between these two, for Nannie was neither
hooked nor kicked, and when Sarah Maria behaved peacefully at both
ends it was manifest that her heart was touched.

X

Steve returned from town the evening following Nannie's outburst with
a mind heavy laden. That had been his mental condition, indeed, much
of the time since he turned farmer, and I may add that his thoughts
occasionally ran in a sarcastic vein--a course ordinarily foreign to
him. Shortly before that crucial point in his career, his marriage to
Nannie, Randolph Chance had loaned him a beautiful idyl, termed
"Liberty and a Living." Randolph himself had read this as a thirsty
man reads of cool, rock-paved brooks; Steve read it as a poet, a
dreamer, but it would no doubt have had a marked effect upon his
character had he not closely followed it up with Charles Dudley
Warner's "Summer in a Garden," much as one would chase a poison with
its antidote, only in this case the order was reversed, the latter
resembling the poison, since it awoke in his mind gloomy forebodings
and inspired satirical reflections upon the universal mother.

Tuned to this key, he was no doubt ill-prepared, while turning the
clod, to receive into his soul the sweet influences of rural life, and
by reason of their elevating beauty, to be fortified against those
drawbacks and trials with which all paths abound.

Truth to tell, Steve was discouraged. He had begun to realize that he
had on his hands not only a small farm, for the tillage of which he
was ill-contrived, but a large child as well, wh