get scared," laughed Gilbert, indulgently. "If folks don't thirst for knowledge, there's small use choking it down their throats. Not that the best of learning comes out of books, for you learned your trade of reading the ground and the weather 'n' hunting and tracking all out o' doors."

"I tell you what we'll do, go over back into the house, light all the lamps I've got, and set them in the windows for a victory illumination. Then we'll cook up a nice little supper for our two selves and have a smoke by the fire. I don't often do it these days, haven't felt peart enough; but to-night, somehow, I feel skittish, like I did forty years ago when a pair of yearling steers I'd trained got first premium at the Old Haven Fair. To-night a pipe between my teeth's not a bad habit as the parsons preach, 'Lisha, but a necessity, yes, a bare, vital necessity."

This proposition being in the direct path of 'Lisha's own desires, he gave a cheerful whistle of consent and followed Gilbert through the partly roofed grape arbor that made a passageway between the post-office and the sloped roofed house of Gilbert's forefathers, that stood well back in the garden with its porch facing the hill road.

"Nobody'll see the lights this time of night," criticised 'Lisha, as Gilbert, mustering an array of six sperm-oil lamps and three sturdy pewter candlesticks, proceeded to distribute them between the various rooms, not forgetting the icy "spare chamber" upstairs, or the "foreroom" at the right of the front door with its scriptural engravings, bright three-ply carpet, and melodeon.

"That's as may be," Gilbert answered, while he regulated a wick, stiff from lack of use, "but they'll be there all the same, and we'll know it anyhow. What'll you have? There's beans and brown bread been in the oven all afternoon, besides apple pie, crullers, biscuits, and spice snaps in the pantry. I think this time o' night when we're wakeful anyway, we might as well have hot coffee to mix and blend the vittles and put some ginger in us. Mebbe you'd prefer hard cider, but since I found the stuff was tangling the feet of some good neighbors, I haven't kept any about. Yes, get a pail of fresh water while I grind the coffee; you can never get the flavor, Mary always said, without fresh-drawn water come to its first boil."

To have seen the neatness of the kitchen, pantry, and long, low bedroom that ran across the back of both, no one would have supposed that the house had been without the touch of a woman's hand for nine years. To be sure, at the critical periods of 

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