one. ’Tain’t everybody that would stay single as long as he has, but that’s just what I expected from the feelings he showed at the funeral, and it coming so long afterward too.”

A murmur of assent showed that the speaker was not the only one who remembered the emotion of the bereaved man on that mournful occasion, which, as had been suggested, occurred some time after his wife’s death, the delay of the sermon devoted to her memory being occasioned, as often happens in country districts of the West and South, by the absence of the preacher proper, whose extended circuit gives him but a portion of the year in one place.

“Well, ’twas to his credit, of course,” observed an elderly woman who was shelling peas; “but I must say I don’t like this way of putting off the funeral so long. I think burying people and preaching about ’em ought to go together, and if you can’t have your own preacher, you’d better put up with somebody else, or go without.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the young woman with the baby. “It looks to me as if folks were in a mighty hurry to get the last word said when they can’t wait for the right one to say it. I shouldn’t want my husband to be so keen to get through with it all, if ’twas me that was taken.”

“Maybe you’d want him to do like the man that took his second wife to hear his first wife’s funeral,” retorted the other.

The defender of local custom admitted, in the midst of a general laugh, that this was carrying it too far, and then the conversation turned on the probability of Jake Erlock’s marrying again, the various suitable persons to be found should he feel so inclined, and the importance in general of men having some one to take care of them, and of women having men and their houses to take care of.

The subject which, with its ramifications, seemed fairly inexhaustible was making Kate Northmore yawn and had fairly driven Esther from the room, when a young man with a bright, sunburned face and a pair of straight, broad shoulders looked in at the window.

“My, how good it smells in here!” he exclaimed in a voice that went well with the face. “What all are we going to have for dinner, Aunt Jenny?”

Mrs. Elwell, who was testing the heat of the oven on a plump bare arm, turned a flushed face and motherly smile on the speaker.

“Everything nice,” she said. “You never saw a better dinner than the girls have brought out for you. What do you say to fried chicken, and new potatoes, and green peas, with pie and doughnuts to top off, and lots of other good things thrown in extra?”

The young man smacked his lips and sent a devouring glance around the room. “Say!” he repeated. “Why, I say it’s enough to make a fellow feel like John Ridd and thank the Lord for the room there is in him. When are you going to give us a chance at all that?”

“When the bell rings, of course,” said Kate Northmore, looking up at him with a saucy glance from the meal she was sifting. “You didn’t expect to get anything to eat now, I hope.”

“Oh, not anything much,” said the young man, helping himself to a doughnut from a plate which stood within easy reach. “I just looked in to tell you that while you’re getting, you’d better get us a plenty. We’re a fearful hungry crowd, and there won’t be much left over; but if there should be, it might come in handy to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” repeated Kate, letting the meal which was whirling under her hand fall level in the pan. “You don’t mean that there’s any danger of your being here to-morrow, do you?”

The young man brushed the chaff from the shoulders of his blue flannel shirt, and set his straw hat a little further on the back of his head before he answered. Kate’s “To-morrow” had put a complete pause on the talk of the room, and every woman there was looking at him anxiously.

“Well, I wouldn’t really say that there’s any need of worrying about it yet” he said, lowering his voice to a confidential tone; “but you see the men have heard that you and Esther are such stunning good cooks that—well, of course, I don’t want to give ’em away, but I don’t know as you can blame ’em any for wanting to make the work hold out so as to get in an extra meal or two here, if they can. That’s all.”

There was a shout at this, and Mrs. Elwell said reproachfully, “Now, Morton, quit your fooling. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to come scaring the girls with your talk about to-morrow? Why, we thought the machine had broken down, or something of that sort.”

He did look a little conscience-smitten just then, as Esther, who had caught some hint of excitement in the dining room, where she was setting the table, appeared in the doorway, looking really troubled. Kate was facing him with a different expression.

“Well, since you’re so anxious about to-morrow, Mort Elwell, you needn’t eat any more of those doughnuts,” she said, snatching up the plate toward which his hand was moving a second time, and setting it out of his reach. “We may want them, you know.”

He drew down his face to an injured expression. “That’s the way you treat a body, is it, when he comes to give you a friendly warning? All right, I’ll go now. I see I’m not wanted.”

He shifted his position as he spoke, and the next moment the pitchfork, on which he had been leaning, was thrust through the window, and as quickly withdrawn, with a doughnut sticking on every point. “Good-by, Kate,” he shouted, as he disappeared. “If the doughnuts don’t hold out, you can make some cookies for to-morrow.”

He had the best of it, and after a moment, apparently, even Kate forgave him, “the rascal,” as she called him, with a toss of her pretty head. And then the talk of the kitchen took a new turn, suggested by the thought of all the ills which would have followed if an accident had really happened to the machine. There had been such accidents in the experience of most of those present, and they were recounted now with much fulness of detail and some rivalry as to the amount of agony endured in the several cases by the workers in the culinary department.

“It’s the worst thing there is about threshing,” said the woman who had related the most harrowing tale of all. “I don’t care how many men there are, and I don’t mind cooking for ’em, and setting out the best I’ve got,—seems as if a body warn’t thankful for the crop if they don’t,—but when the machine gets out of order, and the work hangs on, and you have the men on your hands for three or four days running, just eating you out of house and home, and keeping you on the jump from morning to night, getting things on the table and off again, I tell you it’s something awful.”

There was no demur to this sentiment, but there was still another phase of distress to be mentioned.

“No,” said one of the others, “there ain’t anything quite as bad as that, but it’s the next thing to it to have the threshers come down on you without your having fair warning that they’re coming. I never will forget what a time we had last year. Abe had been telling me all along that they were going to stack the wheat and thresh in the fall, when one day, ’most sundown, up comes the threshing machine right into our barn lot. I told the men there must be some mistake, but they said, no, they’d just made a bargain with Abe, and were going to begin on our wheat in the morning. I tell you I was that mad I couldn’t see straight. Abe he tried to smooth it over, said he found the men had been thrown out at one place, and he thought he’d better close right in on ’em, and I needn’t to worry about the victuals—just give ’em what I had.”

She paused with an accent of inexpressible contempt, and covered her husband’s remarks on that point with the words, “You know how men talk! Why, even our side meat was most gone, and I hadn’t a