slippin’ between the logs an’ gittin’ their daily dousin’.[Pg 23] She couldn’t understand it, an’ there’s a heap o’ things women-folks never do an’ never can understand,—jest because they air women-folks.”

[Pg 23]

“One o’ the things is men, I s’pose,” interrupted Mrs. Wiley.

“Men in general, but more partic’larly husbands,” assented Old Kennebec; “howsomever, there’s another thing they don’t an’ can’t never take in, an’ that’s sport. Steve does river drivin’ as he would horseracin’ or tiger-shootin’ or tight-rope dancin’; an’ he always did from a boy. When he was about twelve or fifteen, he used to help the river-drivers spring and fall, reg’lar. He couldn’t do nothin’ but shin up an’ down the rocks after hammers an’ hatchets an’ ropes, but he was turrible pleased with his job. ‘Stepanfetchit,’ they used to call him them days,—Stephanfetchit Waterman.”

“Good name for him yet,” came in acid tones from the sink. “He’s still steppin’[Pg 24] an’ fetchin’, only it’s Rose that’s doin’ the drivin’ now.”

[Pg 24]

“I’m not driving anybody, that I know of,” answered Rose, with heightened color, but with no loss of her habitual self-command.

“Then, when he graduated from errants,” went on the crafty old man, who knew that when breakfast ceased, churning must begin, “Steve used to get seventy-five cents a day helpin’ clear up the river—if you can call this here silv’ry streamlet a river. He’d pick off a log here an’ there an’ send it afloat, an’ dig out them that hed got ketched in the rocks, and tidy up the banks jest like spring house-cleanin’. If he’d hed any kind of a boss, an’ hed be’n trained on the Kennebec, he’d ’a’ made a turrible smart driver, Steve would.”

“He’ll be drownded, that’s what’ll become o’ him,” prophesied Mrs. Wiley; “’specially if Rose encourages him in such silly foolishness as ridin’ logs from his house down to ourn, dark nights.”[Pg 25]

[Pg 25]

“Seein’ as how Steve built ye a nice pig pen last month, ’pears to me you might have a good word for him now an’ then, mother,” remarked Old Kennebec, reaching for his second piece of pie.

“I wa’n’t a mite deceived by that pig pen, no more’n I was by Jed Towle’s hen coop, nor Ivory Dunn’s well-curb, nor Pitt Packard’s shed-steps. If you hed ever kep’ up your buildin’s yourself, 

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