of his hand across his whiskers.

“We hear you want to sell it, though?” My sentence was a question.

“Dunno whar you heerd thet,” he replied. “I hain’t said I did.”

We mentioned the innkeeper’s name.

“Humph,” said Milt, “Tom knows more about folks sometimes then they do.”

“Don’t you want to sell?” said I.

“Wanter buy?” said he.

“I might,” said I.

“I might,” he answered.

There was not the slightest expression of mirth on his face. The professor did not know whether to laugh or not. But I laughed. I was born of Yankee stock.

“How about water?” I asked, becoming very practical.

“Well,” he said, “thet never dried up. Town main comes down the ro’d yander, from the Slab City reservoar. You kin tap thet if well water hain’t good enough fer ye.”

“Bathrooms?” I suggested.

The old man spat again. “Brook makes a pool sometimes down yander,” he replied, jerking his thumb.

“Suppose we take a look into the house?” suggested the professor.

The old man moved languidly from the door. As he stepped, his old black trouser leg pulled up over his shoe top, and we saw that he wore no stockings. He paused in front of the motor car. “How much did thet benzine buggy cost?” he asked.

“Four thousand dollars,” said the owner.

The gray eyes darted a look into the professor’s face; then they became enigmatic. “Powerful lot o’ money,” he mused, moving on. “Whar’s yourn?” he added to me.

“If I had one of those, I couldn’t have your farm,” said I.

He squinted shrewdly. “Dunno’s yer kin, anyway, do ye?” was his reply.

He now led us into the kitchen. We saw the face of the old lady peering at us from the “butt’ry.” A modern range was backed up against a huge, old-fashioned brick oven, no longer used. A copper pump, with a brass knob on the curved handle, stood at one end of the sink–“Goes ter the well,” said Milt. The floor was of ancient, hardwood planking, now worn into polished ridges. A door led up a low step into the main house, which consisted, downstairs, of two rooms, dusty and disused, to the left, and two similar rooms, used as bedrooms, to the south (all four containing fireplaces), and a hall, where a staircase with carved rail led to the hall above, flanked by four chambers, each with its fireplace, too. Over the kitchen was a long, unfinished room easily converted into a servant’s quarters. Secretly pleased beyond measure at the excellent preservation of the interior, I kept a discreet silence, and with an air of great wisdom began my inspection of the farm.

Twenty acres of the total thirty were on the side of the road with the house, and the lot was almost square–about three hundred yards to a side. Down along the brook the land had been considered worthless. South of the orchard it had grown to sugar maple for a brief space, then to young pine, evidently seedlings of some big trees now cut down, with a little tamarack swamp in the far corner. The pines again ran up the southern boundary from this swamp. The brook flowed cheerily below the orchard, wound amid the open grove of maples, and went with a little drop over green stones into the dusk of the pines. The rest of the land, which lay up a slope to a point a little west of the house and then extended along a level plateau, was either pasture or good average tillage, fairly heavy, with subsoil enough to hold the dressing. It had, however, I fancied, been neglected for many years, like the tumbling stone walls which bounded it, and which also enclosed a four or five acre hayfield occupying the entire southwestern corner of the lot, on the plateau. The professor, who married a summer estate as well as a motor car, confirmed me in this. Behind the barn, on the other side of the road, the rectangular ten-acre lot was rough second-growth timber by the brook, and cow pasture all up the slope and over the plateau.

Returning to the house, we took a sample of the water from the well for analysis. When I asked the old lady (I made the mistake of calling her Mrs. Noble) to boil the bottle and the cork first, I think they both decided I was mad.

“Now,” said I, as I put the sample in my pocket, “if this water gets a clean bill of health, what do you want for the place?”

“What’ll you give me?” said Milt.

“Look here,” said I, “I’m a Yankee, too, and I can answer one question with another just as long as you can. What do you expect me to give you?”

The old man spat meditatively, and wiped his whiskers with the back of his hand.

“Pitt Perkins got $500 an acre for his place,” said he.

“They get $500 a square foot on Wall Street in New York,” I replied.

“And ’twon’t grow corn, neither,” said Milt, with his nearest approximation to a grin.

“It pastures lambs,” put in the professor.

But Milt didn’t look at him. He gazed meditatively at the motor. “So thet contraption cost $4,000, did it?” he mused, as if to himself, “and ’twon’t drop a calf, neither. How’d $8,000 strike you?”

I took the bottle of well water from my pocket, and extended it toward him. “Here,” I said, “there’s no need for me to have this analyzed.”

“Seven?” said he.

“Four!” said I.

“Six?” said he.

“Not a cent over four,” said I.

“All right,” said he, “didn’t much want ter sell anyhow.” And he pocketed the bottle.

I climbed into the car, and the professor walked in front and cranked it. (It had a self-starter, which was, as they usually appear to be, out of commission.) The engine began to throb. The professor put on his gloves.

“Five,” said Milt, “with the hoss an’ two Jerseys an’ all the wood in the shed.”

He was standing in the road beside the modern motor car, a pathetic old figure to me, so like my grandfather in many ways, the last of an ancient order. Poverty, decay, was written on him, as on his farmstead.

“It’s yours!” I cried.

I got out of the car again, and we made arrangements to meet in the village and put the deal through. Then I asked him the question which had been pressing from the first. “Why do you sell?”

He pointed toward a distant estate, with great chimneys and gables, crowning a hill. “This hain’t my country no more,” he said, with a kind of mournful dignity. “It’s theirs, and theirs, and theirs. I’m too old ter l’arn ter lick boots an’ run a farm fer another feller. I wuz brought up on corn bread, not shoe polish. I got a daughter out in York State, an’ she’ll take me in if I pay my board. I guess $5,000 ’ll last me ’bout as long as my breath will. Yer got a good farm here–if yer can afford ter put some money back inter the soil.”

He looked out over his fields and we looked mercifully into the motor. The professor backed the car around, and we said good-bye.

“Hope the bilin’ kills all them bugs in the bottle,” was the old man’s final parting.

“Well!” I cried, as we spun down over the bridge at my brook, “I’ve got a country estate of my own! I’ve got a home! I’ve got freedom!”

“You’ve got stuck,” said the professor. “He’d have taken $4,000.”

“What’s a thousand dollars, more or less?” said I. “Besides, the poor old fellow needs it worse than I do.”

“It’s a thousand dollars,” replied my companion.

“Yes, to you,” I answered. “You are a professor of economics. But to me it’s nothing, for I’m an instructor in English.”

“And the point