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“Yes, and I’ve seen her pitch hay into the barn from the wagon, just as she did for her father,” added the second youth.

“Ah, but the difference! the difference!” mine host, the father, was at pains to point out rather jocosely.”Then it was against her will and without the enabling power of love, while now — “

“Love’s not gonna make hay any lighter,” sagely observed one of the boys.

“What treachery to romance!” I chided.

“No, nor make plowin’ any easier, nuther. Aw! haw!” This from a farm-hand, a fixture about the place.”An’ I’ve seen her doin’ that, too.”

I did my best to stand up for romance, come what might.

Be that as it may, Widdle was about these days in a cheerful and even facetious frame of mind. When I knew him as a teamster he had seemed to wear a heavy and sad look, as though the mystery of life, or perhaps better the struggle for existence, pressed on him as much as it does on any of us. But now that his fortune had improved, he was a trifle more spruce, not so much in clothes, which were the usual farmer wear, but in manner. On certain days, especially in the afternoon, when his home chores were not too onerous or his wife was taking care of them for him, he came visiting my woodland table on its hill. A great and beautiful panorama spread before us. He inquired one day, rather nibblish in manner, as to the matter and manner of writing. Could a man make a living at that now, say? Did you have to write much or little in order to get along? Did I write for these here now magazines?

Rather ruefully I admitted that when I could I did. The way of ye humble scribe, I tried to make plain, was at times thorny. Still, I had no great reason to complain.

We then drifted to the business of farming, and here, I confess, I felt myself to be on much firmer ground. How was he getting along? Had he made much out of his first season’s crop? How was
his second progressing? Did he find fifteen acres difficult to manage? Was his wife well?

To the last question he replied that she was, doing very well indeed, but as for the second from the last:

“Not so very. Course, now,” he went on musingly, “we ain’t got the best implements yet, an’ my wife’s health ain’t as good this summer as ’twas last; but we’re gettin’ along all right. I got mebbe as much as a hundred barrels o’ potatas comin’ along, an’ mebbe three hundred bushels o’ corn. Fer myself, I’m more interested in this here chicken business, if I could once git it a-goin’ right. Course we ain’t got all the up-to-date things we need, but I’m calc’latin’ that next year, if everything goes right, I’ll add a new pen an’ a coupla runways to the coop I got up there, an’ try my hand at more chickens.”

Never his wife’s, I noticed, when it came to this end of the farming institution. And as an aside I could not help thinking of those breakfasts in bed and of his wife pitching hay and plowing, as well as milking the cow and feeding the chickens while he slept.

The lorn Ida and her great love!And then one day, expressing curiosity as to this menage, I was taken there to visit. The place looked comfortable enough — a small, unpainted, two-room affair, with a lean-to at the back for a kitchen, a porch added only the preceding spring, so that milord might have a view of the thymy valley below, with its green fields and distant hills, while he smoked and meditated. It was very clean, as I noticed even from a distance, the doorway and the paths and all. And all about it, at points equidistant from the kitchen, were built a barn, a corn-crib, a smokehouse and a chicken-coop, to say nothing of a new well-top, all unpainted as yet, but all framed by the delicious green of the lawn. And Widdle, once he came forward, commented rather shyly on his treasures, walking about with me the while and pointing them out.