Miss Myers, who kept house for him, and then he was off to town with a waggon load of implements to be mended in time for the summer work. 

 That night a group of typical Ovidians were gathered in the kitchen of old Sam Symmons' house. 

 Sam Symmons lived in a frame house, just at the foot of the incline which led into the village from the north. Like many of the houses of Ovid, his was distinctly typical of its owner. A new house was such a rare thing in Ovid, that the old ones had time to assimilate the characters of their possessors, and to assume an individuality denied to the factors of a more rapidly growing place. 

 Old Sam's house was a tumble-down, rakish, brave-looking old house, with shutters erstwhile painted green. They had once given the whole house quite an air, but their painful lapses in the way of broken slats, and uneven or lost hinges, now superimposed upon it a look of indecision. One of the weather-boards at the south corner was loose and, freed from the nails' restraint, bent outward, as though beckoning the gazer in. It was a hospitable old house, but wary, too, the ornate tin tops of the rain troughs round the roof giving it a knowing look. 

 The native clematis grew better over the weather-beaten gable than anywhere else in Ovid, and the Provence roses, without any care whatever, bloomed better. 

 It was as if the house and its environs were making a gallant but losing light against encroaching time and adverse circumstances. So it was with old Sam. 

 He was an old man. Long before, when Canada's farmers were more than prosperous, when foreign wars kept the price of food grains high, when the soil was virgin and unexhausted, when the military spirit still animated the country, when regulars were in barracks at the nearest town, when every able man was an eager volunteer, when to drink heavily and swear deeply upon all occasions marked the man of ease, when the ladies danced in buckled shoes and chéne taffetas, and were worshipped with chivalrous courtesy and high-flown sobriquets—in those days old Sam Symmons had been known as "Gallant Sam Symmons," and had been welcomed by many high in the land. 

 He had ever been first in a fight, the last upright at the table, a gay dancer and a courtly flirt. But now he was glad to get an audience of tolerant villagers to listen to his old tales. For instead of garnering his money he spent it freely, having ever a generous heart and open hand, and of 

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