te of bread. Then, still
smiling, she passed noiselessly on to the others.

Emory was indeed clumsy, for he had stretched his hand downward to
offer a morsel to a friend of his under the table--he was on terms of
exceeding amity with the four-footed members of the household--and in
his absorption not withdrawing it as swiftly as one accustomed to canine
manners should do, he had his frosted finger well mumbled before he
could, as it were, repossess himself of it.

"I wonder what they charge fur iron over yander at the settlemint,
Em'ry?" observed Sim Roxby presently.

"Dun'no', sir," responded Emory, glumly, his sullen black eyes full of
smouldering fire--"hevin' no call ter know, ez I ain't no blacksmith."

"I war jes' wonderin' ef tenpenny nails didn't cost toler'ble high ez
reg'lar feed," observed Roxby, gravely.

But his mother laughed out with a gleeful cracked treble, always a ready
sequence of her son's rustic sallies. "He got ye that time, Em'ry," she
cried.

A forced smile crossed Emory's face. He tossed back his tangled dark
hair with a gasp that was like the snort of an unruly horse submitting
to the inevitable, but with restive projects in his brain. "I let the
dog hyar ketch my finger whilst feedin' him," he said. His plausible
excuse for the ten-penny expression was complete; but he added, his
darker mood recurring instantly, "An', Mis' Roxby, I hev put a stop ter
them ez hev tuk ter callin' me Em'ly, I hev."

The old woman looked up, her small wrinkled mouth round and amazed.
"_I_ never called ye Emily," she declared.

Swift repentance seized him.

"Naw, 'm," he said, with hurried propitiation. "I 'lowed ye did."

"I didn't," said the old woman. "But ef I warter find it toothsome ter
call ye 'Emily,' I dun'no' how ye air goin' ter pervent it. Ye can't go
gun-nin' fur me, like ye done fur the men at the mill, fur callin' ye
'Emily.'"

"Law, Mis' Roxby!" he could only exclaim, in his horror and contrition
at this picture he had thus conjured up. "Ye air welcome ter call me
ennything ye air a mind ter," he protested.

And then he gasped once more. The eyes of the guest, contemptuous,
amused, seeing through him, were fixed upon him. And he himself had
furnished the lily-handed stranger with the information that he had been
stigmatized "Em'ly" in the banter of his associates, until he had taken
up arms, as it were, to repress this derision.

"It takes powerful little ter put ye down, Em'ry," sa