, but I don't believe
it's goin' to git much fa'tha."

"Why, what's the matta?" demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.

The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include
Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,
"Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?"

"Seen 'em, too," answered Lander, comprehensively.

"Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly. He a'n't a do-nothin';
he's a do-everything. I guess it's about as bad." Lander glimmered back
at the man, but did not speak.

"Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from," the farmer
began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for
a moment, interrupted:

"Yes, Yes! That's what the gul said."

"But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's
goin' in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin'
lathe, and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for
fence-posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but
the place bunt down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for
wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks.
Seems to think that the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's
dry, is goin' to cure him, and he can't git too much of it."

"Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!" cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband
had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of
controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.

"I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's
got, and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up. But he don't
seem to be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow.
Wife takes in sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last
season. Whole fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do
everything."

The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but
the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which
began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and
the man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited
the father's smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures,
and one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They
were all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they
almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved
little thing, but the man in the hay