Seth Curtis is standing up in his wagon and
sawing his horses' mouths cruelly. Seth has been so viciously
mistreated in his youth that he now abuses at times the very things
that he loves. He has paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece for
those horses and is mighty proud of them. But Seth's temper is never
good on a rainy day. Rain means no teaming and a money loss. Seth is
a mite too conscious of money. At any rate, the loss of even a dollar
makes him a sullen and at the least provocation an angry man. He isn't
liked much except by his wife and children.

In his home Seth is gentle and kind. Maybe because here he finds the
love and trust that all his life he has craved and been denied. Few of
his neighbors know how he laughs and romps and sings with his children
and what wonderful yarns he tells them, all made up out of his own head.

He is known to come from York State and has a Yankee shrewdness that
some people say can at times be called something else. He is wide and
square-shouldered though short, has a round stubborn head of reddish
hair with a promising bald spot, close-set blue eyes and an annoying,
almost an insulting habit of paying all his bills promptly and asking
odds and favors of nobody.

To-day he was to have taken a load of stones, granite niggerheads of
all sizes, up to Colonel Stratton's place. The Colonel is going to
make a fern bed around his summer house.

Colonel Stratton is a real military colonel. He wears burnsides and
they are very becoming. He has the most beautifully located residence
in Green Valley and like Doc Philipps has some of the most beautiful
trees in town. The great silver-leaf poplar guarding the wide front
lawns and the magnificent hardwood maples are the pride of the
colonel's heart.

The colonel has a cultivated garden that keeps his gardener pretty
busy. But the wild-flower garden along the rambling old north fence
the colonel tends himself. In June it is a hedge of lovely wild roses
followed a little later by masses of purple phlox. Then come the
meadow lilies and the painted cup and so on, until in late October you
can not see the old fence for the goldenrod, asters and gentians.

Today the colonel hoped to work on his fern bed but the weather being
what it is he takes instead from his well-filled book shelves "The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and settles down to a day of
solid joy.

In the big, softly stained house that stands in the