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“Indeed you are,” cried Sue, holding her side from laughing. Mrs. Banning also vainly tried to repress her hilarity over the absurd guy into which the nattily-dressed city man had transformed himself.

“Come,” he cried, “no frivolity! You shall at least say I kept my word about the trees to-day.” And they started at once for the scene of action, Minturn obtaining on the way a shovel from the tool-room.

“To think she’s eighteen years old and got a beau!” muttered the farmer, as he and Hiram started two new holes. They were dug and others begun, yet the young people had not returned. “That’s the way with young men nowadays–‘big cry, little wool.’ I thought I was going to have Sue around with me all day. Might as well get used to it, I suppose. Eighteen! Her mother’s wasn’t much older when–yes, hang it, there’s always a WHEN with these likely girls. I’d just like to start in again on that day when I tossed her into the haymow.”

“What are you talking to yourself about, father?”

“Oh! I thought I had seen the last of you to-day.”

“Perhaps you will wish you had before night.”

“Well, now, Sue! the idea of letting Mr. Minturn rig himself out like that! There’s no use of scaring the crows so long before corn-planting.” And the farmer’s guffaw was quickly joined by Hiram’s broad “Yah! yah!”

She frowned a little as she said, “He doesn’t look any worse than I do.”

“Come, Mr. Banning, Solomon in all his glory could not so take your daughter’s eye to-day as a goodly number of trees standing where she wants them. I suggest that you loosen the soil with the pickaxe, then I can throw it out rapidly. Try it.”

The farmer did so, not only for Minturn, but for Hiram also. The lightest part of the work thus fell to him. “We’ll change about,” he said, “when you get tired.”

But Minturn did not get weary apparently, and under this new division of the toil the number of holes grew apace.

“Sakes alive, Mr. Minturn!” ejaculated Mr. Banning, “one would think you had been brought up on a farm.”

“Or at ditch-digging,” added the young man. “No; my profession is to get people into hot water and then make them pay roundly to get out. I’m a lawyer. Times have changed in cities. It’s there you’ll find young men with muscle, if anywhere. Put your hand here, sir, and you’ll know whether Miss Banning made a bad bargain in hiring me for the day.”

“Why!” exclaimed the astonished farmer, “you have the muscle of a blacksmith.”

“Yes, sir; I could learn that trade in about a month.”

“You don’t grow muscle like that in a law-office?”

“No, indeed; nothing but bills grow there. A good fashion, if not abused, has come in vogue, and young men develop their bodies as well as brains. I belong to an athletic club in town, and could take to pugilism should everything else fail.”

“Is there any prospect of your coming to that?” Sue asked mischievously.

“If we were out walking, and two or three rough fellows gave you impudence–” He nodded significantly.

“What could you do against two or three? They’d close on you.”

“A fellow taught to use his hands doesn’t let men close on him.”

“Yah, yah! reckon not,” chuckled Hiram. One of the farm household had evidently been won.

“It seems to me,” remarked smiling Sue, “that I saw several young men in town who appeared scarcely equal to carrying their canes.”

“Dudes?”

“That’s what they are called, I believe.”

“They are not men. They are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, but the beginning of the great downward curve of evolution. Men came up from monkeys, it’s said, you know, but science is in despair over the final down-comes of dudes. They may evolute into grasshoppers.”

The farmer was shaken with mirth, and Sue could not help seeing that he was having a good time. She, however, felt that no tranquilly exciting day was before her, as she had anticipated. What wouldn’t that muscular fellow attempt before night? He possessed a sort of vim and cheerful audacity which made her tremble, “He is too confident,” she thought, “and needs a lesson. All this digging is like that of soldiers who soon mean to drop their shovels. I don’t propose to be carried by storm just when he gets ready. He can have his lark, and that’s all to-day. I want a good deal of time to think before I surrender to him or any one else.”