“Leak—just so—nothing but leaks the whole time! Hain’t I lost crop after crop, and yours a payin’ the best prices? Wasn’t my orchard all killed?—there ain’t ten trees but’s cankered! And hundreds of dollars I’ve sunk in them confounded—beg pardon, Squire—them—them—outrageous threshing machines.”
The Squire chirruped to his horse—“Steady, Bill—steady! Haven’t you been in too much of a hurry to get rich, Gilman, and so been discontented when you were doing well? You always seemed to have more time than I. I don’t believe I ever spent an afternoon at Mooney’s since I was grown up. I’ve worked hard, and so has my wife.” “Yours has, too,” he added, after a moment. “I don’t know of a more hard-working woman than Abby Gilman.”
“True as the gospel, Squire, poor soul!” and the fretful, discontented look on the man’s face passed away for a moment. A recollection of all her patient labor and care came over him, and how very different things would have been if he had followed her example, and listened to her entreaties.
“Why don’t you take a new start?” said the Squire, encouragingly, for he knew that if any thing could rouse his old companion it would be the love for his wife. “You’ve got some pretty good land left, and ought to be able to work. We’re both of us young men yet. My father made every cent he had after he was your age; and there’s Sam, quite a big boy, he ought to be considerable help.”
“Yes, he’s as good a boy as ever lived, I’ll own that—but hard work don’t agree with me. It never did.”
Gilman was quite right. It never had agreed with his indolent disposition. There are a great many children as well as men who make the same complaint.
“If a body could find a lump of gold, now, Squire, to set a fellow up again.”
“I do believe you’d think it was too much trouble to stoop and pick it up,” Mr. Merrill said, good-naturedly. He saw that California was still uppermost in his companion’s mind. “And just look at that stone wall, and your barn—it wouldn’t be very hard work to mend either of them, and I don’t believe a stone or a board has been touched for the last two years, except what Sam has contrived to do.”
Gilman looked thoroughly ashamed. With the evidence of neglect staring him in the face, he could not even resent it. He seemed relieved when the Squire drew up before the end door, to think that the lecture was over. There, too, were broken fences, dilapidated windows, every trace of neglect and decay. The place once appropriated to the wood-pile was empty, and instead of the daily harvest of well-seasoned chips, hickory and pine, a few knotted sticks and small branches lay near the block. One meagre-looking cow stood shivering in the most sheltered corner of the barn-yard, without even the cackle of a hen to cheer her solitude. The upper hinges of the great barn door had given way, but there was nothing to secure it by, and it had been left so since the cold weather first came. Every thing looked doubly desolate in the gray, fading light of a wintry day, and the blaze that streamed up through the kitchen window was too fitful to promise a cheerful fireside. Yet fifteen years ago, this very homestead had been known for miles around for its comfort and plenty.