"There are no stoves in the house, I suppose?" Lyddy asked, wistfully.

"Bless ye! Dr. Polly wouldn't never have a stove in his house, saving a cook-stove in the kitchen, an' of course, that's ate up with rust afore this," exclaimed the farmer's wife. "He said open fireplaces assured every room its proper ventilation. He didn't believe in these new-fangled ways of shuttin' up chimneys. My! but he was powerful sot on fresh air an' sunshine."

"Once," pursued Mrs. Pritchett, "he was called to see Mis' Fibbetts--she that was a widder and lived on 'tother side of the ridge, on the road to Adams. She had a mis'ry of some kind, and was abed with all the windows of her room tight closed.

"'Open them windows,' says Dr. Polly to the neighbor what was a-nursing of Mis' Fibbetts."

Next time he come the windows were down again. Dr. Polly warn't no gentleman, an' he swore hard, he did. He flung up the windows himself, an' stamped out of the room.

"It was right keen weather," chuckled Mrs. Pritchett, her double chins shaking with enjoyment, "and Mis' Fibbetts was scared to death of a little air. Minute Dr. Polly was out of sight, she made the neighbor woman shut the windows again.

"But when Dr. Polly turned up the ridge road he craned out of the buggy, and he saw the windows shut. He jerked his old boss around, drove back to the house, stalked into the sick woman's room, cane in hand, and smashed every pane of glass in the windows, one after another.

"'Now I reckon ye'll get air enough to cure ye 'fore ye get them mended,' says he, and marched him out again. And sure enough old Mis' Fibbetts got well and lived ten years after. But she never had a good word for Dr. Polly Phelps, just the same," chuckled the narrator.

"Well, we'll make out somehow about fires," said Lyddy, cheerfully, "if Lucas can cut us enough wood to keep them going."

"I sure can," declared the ever-ready youth, and just here Cyrus Pritchett, having eaten his fill, broke in upon the conversation in a tone that quite startled Lyddy and 'Phemie Bray.

"I wanna know what ye mean to do up there on the old Polly Phelps place?" he asked, pushing back his chair, having set down his coffee-cup noisily, and wiped his cuff across his lips. "I gotta oral contract with Jane Hammond to work that farm. It's been in force year after year for more than ten 

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