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But when I asked about his future, after due comments on the pathos of his great loss, he showed a strong, if repressed, interest in the fact that all this which had been his wife’s was now his, assuming that no undue wind arose to disturb him. For some reason, due to no conscious effort on my part, he assumed that I was friendly to him and wished him well, and in consequence, not five minutes after I had come out of the house, he wished to know if I had seen the barn. I replied that I had not and expressed interest, and he took me to see it, solemnly and slowly, cortège style. Once there, his spirit seemed to unlimber, and he talked of the future that was now his. The one horse he had there was good enough, but now that he was alone and might need to hire occasional help, he was thinking of buying another. His wife had helped him a good bit, and he wasn’t sure whether he could get along now without a man. Next came the pigs, which we examined with care. His wife had thought that four were enough for this fall, but next year, if his crops turned out right, he might try six or eight. There was money in the dairy business, too, if only a man had three or four cows; but there was a lot of trouble connected with feeding, milking, calving, and the like, and he wasn’t sure that he understood this as well as his wife had. Did I know anything about the law governing a wife’s property or her husband’s just claim to it?

“You know,” he said, leaning against one of the posts of the pig-pen, “my wife’s relations ain’t any too friendly to me, fer some reason. I never could make it out, an’ I was thinkin’ mebbe they’d feel they have a claim on this, though when we bought, she wouldn’t have it any other way but joint.’Squire,’ she says to Squire Driggs over to Shrivertown, when she was havin’ the property transferred to the two of us when we got married, ‘I want this property fixed so that in case anything happens to either of us the other one gets it, money an’ all.’ That’s what she said, an’ that’s what both of us signed over there to Shrivertown. I got the papers in the house here now. That’s clear enough, ain’t it? I’d like to bring the papers up to you some time an’ let you look at ’em. There ain’t no way they could interfere with that, is there, do you think?”

I thought not, and said so. It seemed to ease him some. Then he led me to the chicken-coop and the milk-house. We stood at a fence and looked over that five-acre field adjoining which some day he hoped to own. After a few more comments as to the merits of the departed, I left, and saw him but once after, some two weeks later, when, the funeral being over and the first fresh misery of his grief having passed, he came up to my table on the hilltop one sunny afternoon to spend a social moment or two, as I thoug
ht, but really to discuss the latter phases of his position as master and widower.

V

The afternoon was so fine! A sea of crystal light bathed the hills and valleys, and where I worked, the ground was mottled with light sifting through the leaves. Birds sang, and two woodchucks, bitten by curiosity, reconnoitered my realm. Then the brush crackled, and forward came Widdle out of nowhere and sidling slightly as he came.