[Pg 15]

“You won’t,” his wife responded with the snap of a dish towel, “or if you do, they’ll wilt with the heat.”

Rose smiled, but the soft hand with which she tied the neck-cloth about the old man’s withered neck pacified his spirit, and he smiled knowingly back at her as she took her seat at the breakfast table spread near the open kitchen door. She was a dazzling Rose, and, it is to be feared, a wasted one, for there was no one present to observe her clean pink calico and the still more subtle note struck in the green ribbon[Pg 16] which was tied round her throat,—the ribbon that formed a sort of calyx, out of which sprang the flower of her face, as fresh and radiant as if it had bloomed that morning.

[Pg 16]

“Give me my coffee turrible quick,” said Mr. Wiley; “I must be down the bridge ’fore they start dog-warpin’ the side jam.”

“I notice you’re always due at the bridge on churnin’ days,” remarked his spouse, testily.

“’Taint me as app’ints drivin’ dates at Edgewood,” replied the old man. “The boys’ll hev a turrible job this year. The logs air ricked up jest like Rose’s jackstraws; I never see’em so turrible ricked up in all my exper’ence; an’ Lije Dennett don’ know no more ’bout pickin’ a jam than Cooper’s cow. Turrible sot in his ways, too; can’t take a mite of advice. I was tellin’ him how to go to work on that bung that’s formed between the gre’t gray rock an’ the shore,—the awfullest place to bung that there is between this an’ Biddeford,—and says he: ‘Look[Pg 17] here, I’ve be’n boss on this river for twelve year, an’ I’ll be doggoned if I’m goin’ to be taught my business by any man!’ ‘This ain’t no river,’ says I, ‘as you’d know,’ says I, ‘if you’d ever lived on the Kennebec.’ ‘Pity you hedn’t stayed on it,’ says he. ‘I wish to the land I hed, ’says I. An’ then I come away, for my tongue’s so turrible spry an’ sarcustic that I knew if I stopped any longer I should stir up strife. There’s some folks that’ll set on addled aigs year in an’ year out, as if there wan’t good fresh ones bein’ laid every day; an’ Lije Dennett’s one of ’em, when it comes to river drivin’.”

[Pg 17]

“There’s lots o’ folks as have made a good livin’ by mindin’ their own business,” observed the still sententious Mrs. Wiley, as she speared a soda-biscuit with her fork.

“Mindin’ your own business is a turrible selfish trade,” responded her 

 Prev. P 7/66 next