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Show eiri of "Mlter prkhard moR CopyR-lOHT ?y DOU6LEDAy, RAG 6 6 CO. SYNOPSIS. 4 I prow tired of my work as a college Instructor and buy a New England farm on sisnt. I inspect my farm nnd go to board at Bort Temple's. Bert helps me to h re a carpenter and a farmer. Hard Lider. the carpenter, estimates the repairs and changes necessary on the house. Mike commences plowing. I start to prune the orchard trees. Now we hope the professor is going to come out in his true colors and not leave us long&r in doubt as to why he bought his farm. He is into it deep enough for another day to determine de-termine his attitude. CHAPTER IV. Humbled by a Drag Scraper. One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the garden. I am by nature a trusting soul, anyway (which no woman and possibly no wise man ever is where carpenters, builders and plumbers are concerned), and I trusted Hard Cider implicitly. lie told me the plumbers were "doin' all right," and I believed him. That he himself was doing all right my own eyes told me. for he had by now reached the south rooms, removed the dividing partition, par-tition, revealing the old, hand-hewn oak beam at the top, and was cutting a double door out in the center on either ei-ther side of the great oak upright, toward my future sundial lawn. I stood in this new door, looking back at my twin fireplaces, with their plain-paneled plain-paneled old mantels. "Mr. Howard," said I, "those mantels man-tels are about as plain as you could make 'em, and yet they are very handsome, hand-some, somehow, dingy as they are." "It's the lines," said Hard Cider. "Jest the right lines. Lower 'em six inches, and wuar'd they be?" "Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from one to the other, and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room from the center, making it the back of a double settle?" I asked. "I'm a carpenter," Hard replied laconically. la-conically. I took his pencil and sketched what I wanted on a clean board. "Yer got too much curve on the base and arms o' them settles," he said judicially. He took the pencil away from me, and made a quick, neat, accurate sketch of just what I instantly saw I did want. , I shrugged my shoulders. "Go ahead!" said I. "What did -you ask me to draw it for in the first place?" "Folks likes to think they hev their own idees." he answered. I turned away, through the new south door, into the May sunshine. The pergola was not commenced. In fact. I had decided not to build it till the following spring. Those beastly painters paint-ers whom I had forgotten were going to eat up too much of my slender capital. capi-tal. Before me stretched the 250 feet of plowed slope which was to be my sundial lawn. At the end of it was my line of stakes, where the ramblers were to climb. Beyond that was the vegetable garden, newly harrowed and fertilized, where Mike and Joe were busily working, the one planting peas, the other setting out a row of beets. The horse was not in evidence. I could have him at last, to make my lawn! I ran around the house to the stable, put on the harness, hitched him to my new drag scraper, and drove him to the slope. The ground here sloped down eastward east-ward toward the brook, and if I was to have a level lawn south of my house, I should have to remove at least two feet of soil from the western end and deposit it on the eastern end. I wisely decided to start close to the bouse. Hauling at the handles of the heavy scraper and yelling "Back up, there!' at the horse, I got the steel scoop into the ground at the line of my proposed grape arbor, tipped down the blade and cried, "Giddup!" I hung to the reins as best I could, t"" about my wrist, and the horse started obediently forward. The scoop d Its work very nicely. In fact, it v. as quite full after we had gone s,x oet and I had only to lot the horse dr.. ft the remaining 94 feet of toe proposed width of the lawn, and empty It. As the scraper covered a furrow but two feet wide, that meant 125 furrows to scrape n entire lawn as planned, and at least twenty trips to the furrow, d d some rapid multiplication, dropped fhe reins and' moved toward my stake, fsaw that Joe and Mike were look.ng at"I3think," said I, with some dignity, as I be-an to pull the stakes up, that Lis , awn will V better squar. As It's a hundred feet broad, a h'mdrcd "eet will be far enough to extend it rrom the house." . "Sure," said Mike, "the big road scraper '1! be over here tomorrow, scrapin' the road, and it do be easier an' quicker to borry that." In some ways, I consider this remark re-mark of Mike's, under the circumstances, circum-stances, one of the most gentlemanly I ever heard! And I jumped at bis suggestion. "Mike." said I, "I'll admit this job Is bigger than I thought. How can I borrow the road scraper?" "Sure, ain't me friud Dan Morris-sey Morris-sey one o' the selictmen?" said Mike, "and ain't he the road boss, and ain't he willin' to earn an extra penny for for the town?" "H'h," said I; "for the town! Well, I've got to have this lawn! Ton get your friend Dan in the morning. Just the same. I don't love the town so much that I want a 250-foot lawn." Noon came and found me with aching ach-ing arms and strained shoulder sockets. sock-ets. I had brought some luncH, to save the walk back to Mrs. Temple's, and I took it into my big south room to eat it. Hard was in there eating bis. The plumbers were eating theirs in the new kitchen, already completed. Hard, I found, had begun the bookcase, book-case, which was just the height of the mantels. He had been preparing the top molding with bis universal plane f'jen noon came, and the sweet shavings shav-ings lay curled on the floor. I scuffed my feet in them, and even hung one from my ear, as children do, while Hard Cider regarded me scornfully. "I'm going to have great times in this room!" I exclaimed. "Books between be-tween the fireplaces, books along the walls, just a few pictures, including my Hirosbiges, over the mantels, my desk by the west window, and out there the green garden! A man ought to write something pretty good in this room, eh?" Hard looked at me with narrowed eyes. "I don't know nothin' about writin'," he said, "but it 'pears to me a feller could write most anywhar per-vided per-vided he had somcthin' ter say." Whereupon Hard concluded by biting bit-ing into a large piece of prune pie. The Yankee temperament is occasionally occa-sionally depressing! I went outdoors again, eating my doughnuts as I walked, and strolled into the vegetable garden to survey the staked rows which denoted beets and peas. Then I went down the slope into my little stand of pines, into the cool bush of them, and unconsciously my brain relaxed re-laxed in the' baSi of their peace, and 15-t-J 1 Mrs. Temple Was Beaming When I Came Down From My Bath. for ten minutes I lay on the needles, neither asleep nor awake, just blissfully bliss-fully vacant. Then I returned to my scooping, mnrvelously restored. I scooped and spread and raked until six o'clock, when, palm-sore and weary, I drank a great dipperful of water from my copper pump in the kitchen, took a last look at Hard's bookcase, and tramped up the dusty road to supper. sup-per. Mrs. Temple was beaming when I came down from my bath. "Well," said she, "ln the first place, I've got you the housekeeper I want." "By which I infer that she's the one I want, too?" I asked. "Of course," said Mrs. Temple, on whom irony had no effect. "She's Mrs. Tillig, from Slab City, nnd she's an artist in pies. Tillig ain't dead, worse luck, but he's whar he won't trouble you.' I guess Peter won't trouble you none, neither. He's a nice boy, and he'll be awful bandy round the place." "Peter Tillig!" I exclaimed. "There ain't no such animal! If there is, Dickens was his grandfather. How old is Peter?" "Peter's eleven," Mrs. Bert replied. "He's real nice and bright. His mother's moth-er's brought him up fine. Anyhow, she was a Corliss." "But, eugenically speaking, refer may have a predisposition to follow in father's footsteps, which I infer led toward the little greeu swinging doors," I protested. "Speakin' U. S. A., tommyrot!" said Mrs. Temple. "Anyhow, it's the door o' the drugstore in this town. They sell more'n sody water down to Dan-forth's." Dan-forth's." "What am I to pay the author o! Peter and the pies?" I asked. "Well, seein's how you keep Peter, as it were, and Mrs. Pillig calc'latei she can rent her house up to Slab City, she's goin' to come to you for twenty dollars a month. She's wuth it, too. You'll have the best kept and cleanest house in Bentford." I rose from the table solemnly. "Mrs. Temple," said I, "I accept Mrs. Pillig, Teter and the pies at these terms, but only on one condition: She is never to clean my study!" "Why?" asked Mrs. Temple. "Because," said I, "you can never tell where an orderly woman will put things." Bert chuckled as he filled his pipe. Mrs. Temple grinned herself. I was about to make a triumphant exit, when these words from Mrs. Temple's lips arrested me: "Bert." she said, "did you clean the buggy today? You know you gotter go over ter the deepot tomorrow an' git that boarder." "That what?" I cried. Mrs. Bert's eyes half closed with a purely feminine delight. "Oh, ain't I told you?" she said innocently. "We're goin' ter hev another boarder, a young lady. From Noo York, too. Her health's broke down, she says, only that's not the way she said it, and somehow she heard of us. We ain't never taken many boarders, but I guess our name's in that old railroad advertisin' book. I wouldn't hev took her, only I thought maybe you wuz kind o' lonesome here with jest us." "Mrs. Temple," said I, "your solicitude solici-tude quite overwhelms me. Comfort me with petticoats! Good Lord! And an anemic, too! I'll bet she has nerves! When can Mrs. Pillig come to me. woman?" Mrs. Bert's eyes closed still farther. "Oh, your house ain't near ready yet," she said. "Why, the painters ain't even began." I fled to my chamber and hauled forth a manuscript. A female boarder! "Hang Mrs. Temple!" I muttered, rending rend-ing a whole paragraph of manuscript without taking in a word of it. CHAPTER V. The Hermit Sings. The lext morning I demanded that Mrs. Temple again put me up some lunch. "For," said I, "I'm going to postpone meeting this broken-down wreck of a perhaps once proud female as long as possible." "Maybe when you see her drive by you'll be sorry,." Mrs. Bert smiled. "I shall be working on the south side of the bouse," I retorted. I had not been long nt my place, indeed, I bad scarcely finished watering water-ing my seedbed and carting out my daily stint of two barrowloads oi slash from the orchard, when I heard the road scraper rattling over the bridge by the brook. Mike came from the vegetable garden and met his "frind Morrissy," to whom I was ceremoniously cere-moniously presented. The scraper was a large affair with flat-tired iron wheels and a blade eight feet long. The way that eight-foot eight-foot blade, with four horses hauling It peeled off the old furrows and broughi the top soil down from the high side to the low made my poor efforts with the scoop look puuy enough. The lawn was shaping up so fast that I began once more to grow expansive. "It really won't be square." thought I. "because my pergola will cut off twelve feet of the length, and if I have flower beds by the roses they'll cut off some more. I guess those roses ought to be one hundred and twelve feet from the bouse." I threw down my shovel, went over to the row of stakes, and moved them south again, twenty-flve feet, having added thirteen feet as I walked: then I called out to "frind Morrissy" tc bring his scraper. A day fooled away leveling off a place for a sun-dial lawn! Evidently the esthetic side of tilling the soil appeals to this gentleman-farmer. But why does he object to Mrs. Temple i taking in a female boarder? I (TO BE COXTLNUED.J I |