t the snorting combination of wheels, and cranks, and fire,
and smoke, thundering by the quiet fields, breaks in upon the monotonous
labor of the hand who works alone, with no one to converse with,--for
the fact is equally curious, that gangs of laborers make no pause on the
appearance of a locomotive. They have companionship enough already.

This old wooden farm-house was a very shabby affair. To look at it, one
would be sure that the owner had a particular aversion to both paint and
whitewash. The weather-boarding was fairly honeycombed by age and
exposure to the sun and rain, and in some places the end of a board had
dropped off, and hung down a foot or two, for want of a nail which
everybody about the place appeared to be too lazy or neglectful to
supply in time. One or two of the window-shutters had lost a hinge, and
they also hung askew,--nobody had thought it worth while to drive back
the staple when it first became loose.

Then there were several broken lights of glass in the kitchen windows.
As the men about the house neglected to have them mended, or to do it
themselves by using the small bit of putty that would have kept the
cracked ones from going to pieces, the women had been compelled to keep
out the wind and rain by stuffing in the first thing that came to hand.
There was a bit of red flannel in one, an old straw bonnet in another,
while in a third, from which all the glass was gone, a tolerably good
fur hat, certainly worth the cost of half a dozen lights, had been
crammed in to fill up the vacancy. The whole appearance of the windows
was deplorable. Some of them had lost the little wooden buttons which
kept up the sash when hoisted, and which anybody could have replaced by
whittling out new ones with his knife; but as no one did it, and as the
women must sometimes have the sashes raised, they propped them up with
pretty big sticks from the wood-pile. It was not a nice sight, that of a
rough stick as thick as one's arm to hold up the sash, especially when,
of a sultry day, three or four of them were always within view.

Then the wooden step at the kitchen door, instead of being nailed fast
to the house, was not only loose, but it rested on the ground so
unevenly as to tilt over whenever any one stepped carelessly on its
edge. As the house contained a large family, all of whom generally lived
in the kitchen, there was a great deal of running in and out over this
loose step. When it first broke away from