p love for his children,
he was never at ease in his boys' presence; and, as they grew older,
nothing but the influence of their mother's respect for their father
prevented their having an impatient contempt for his unlikeness to the
busy, active, thrifty farmers of the neighborhood.

It was a strange picture that the little kitchen presented on a winter
evening. Reuben sat always on the left hand of the big fire-place, with a
book on his knees. Draxy was curled up on an old-fashioned cherry-wood
stand close to his chair, but so high that she rested her little dimpled
chin on his head. A tallow candle stood on a high bracket, made from a
fungus which Reuben had found in the woods. When the candle flared and
dripped, Draxy sprang up on the stand, and, poised on one foot, reached
over her father's head to snuff it. She looked like a dainty fairy
half-floating in the air, but nobody knew it. Jane sat in a high-backed
wooden rocking-chair, which had a flag bottom and a ruffled calico
cushion, and could only rock a very few inches back and forth, owing to
the loss of half of one of the rockers. For the first part of the evening,
Jane always knitted; but by eight o'clock the hands relaxed, the needles
dropped, the tired head fell back against the chair, and she was fast
asleep.

The boys were by themselves in the farther corner of the room, playing
checkers or doing sums, or reading the village newspaper. Reuben and Draxy
were as alone as if the house had been empty. Sometimes he read to her in
a whisper; sometimes he pointed slowly along the lines in silence, and the
wise little eyes from above followed intently. All questions and
explanations were saved till the next morning, when Draxy, still curled up
like a kitten, would sit mounted on the top of the buckwheat barrel in the
store, while her father lay stretched on the counter, smoking. They never
talked to each other, except when no one could hear; that is, they never
spoke in words; there was mysterious and incessant communication between
them whenever they were together, as there is between all true lovers.

At nine o'clock Reuben always shut the book, and said, "Kiss me, little
daughter." Draxy kissed him, and said, "Good-night, father dear," and that
was all. The other children called him "pa," as was the universal custom
in the village. But Draxy even in her babyhood had never once used the
word. Until she was seven or eight years old she called him "Farver;"
afte