"Nothing is new to me," answered Kenelm, mournfully. "But allow me to observe that to do things well you should only do one thing at a time. I am here to make hay and not conversation."
"My!" said the girl, in amazed ejaculation, and turned off with a toss of her pretty head.
"I wonder if that jade has got an uncle," thought Kenelm. The farmer, who took his share of work with the men, halting now and then to look round, noticed Kenelm's vigorous application with much approval, and at the close of the day's work shook him heartily by the hand, leaving a two-shilling piece in his palm. The heir of the Chillinglys gazed on that honorarium, and turned it over with the finger and thumb of the left hand.
"Be n't it eno'?" said the farmer, nettled.
"Pardon me," answered Kenelm. "But, to tell you the truth, it is the first money I ever earned by my own bodily labour; and I regard it with equal curiosity and respect. But if it would not offend you, I would rather that, instead of the money, you had offered me some supper; for I have tasted nothing but bread and water since the morning."
"You shall have the money and supper both, my lad," said the farmer, cheerily. "And if you will stay and help till I have got in the hay, I dare say my good woman can find you a better bed than you'll get in the village inn; if, indeed, you can get one there at all."
"You are very kind. But before I accept your hospitality excuse one question: have you any nieces about you?"
"Nieces!" echoed the farmer, mechanically thrusting his hands into his breeches-pockets as if in search of something there, "nieces about me! what do you mean? Be that a newfangled word for coppers?"
"Not for coppers, though perhaps for brass. But I spoke without metaphor. I object to nieces upon abstract principle, confirmed by the test of experience."
The farmer stared, and thought his new friend not quite so sound in his mental as he evidently was in his physical conformation, but replied, with a laugh, "Make yourself easy, then. I have only one niece, and she is married to an iron-monger and lives in Exeter."