But while he was thus carrying out, in secret, his plan at the mill, he little suspected how matters stood at the farmhouse. The farmer’s wife, who was a more shrewd observer than himself in such things as came directly under her charge, had noticed for some time past that the returns from the mill seemed short in weight, and at length she confided her suspicions to her husband.
“Nonsense!” said he. “I’ve known the miller all his life, and his father before him: his father had a conscience, and so has he.”
“Well,” replied his wife, “there’s one way of testing it that neither you nor anybody else can object to. I weighed what we last sent him; now we’ll weigh what he sends back to us.”
As the farmer could find no fault with this proposal, he called it a bargain, and the next day went to the mill for the grinding. The miller received him gladly and hastened to carry out his grist to the wagon. As he drove homeward the farmer said to himself:
“How strange that wife should speak so about the flour! But women do sometimes take up such queer notions. I’ll be bound, now, that she will be waiting, when I get home, to have the bags put on the scales as soon as they are unloaded.”
He was not wrong. As he drove through the gate around to the side porch his wife appeared in her great white apron, hardly able to keep quiet until the wagon was backed up, and as the bags were taken out of it they were laid, one by one, on the scales that stood near.
“How does it come out, wife?” cried the farmer as she set down the pounds contained in the last bag.
But she kept on going over the figures again and again without answering, at which the old man put on his spectacles and hastily footed them up.