"Will you, indeed, and double deed?"
"Yes, indeed, and deed and double deed, I'll wait for you, Janet."
"That'll be nice," said Janet, continuing her breakfast with meditative seriousness. "Now I'm your sweetheart, ain't I?"
XXXIII
POSTSCRIPTUM
It was in the last days of October, a few weeks after the proper close of the story which I have just related, when Henry Miller—the most matter-of-fact and unsensational of young men—threw his family into a state of excitement and supplied the gossip of the neighborhood with a fresh topic by announcing at home and abroad that he was going to leave the country, either for the Iowa country to the west of the Mississippi or for the fertile bottom-lands up north on the "Wisconse" River, as it was called. He was the only son of his father, and had inherited the steady, plodding industry and frugality so characteristic of a "Pennsylvania Dutch" race. Until he was of age he was bound, not only by law, but by the custom of the country, to serve his father much as a bondsman or an apprentice might have served, for an able-bodied son was distinctly recognized as an available and productive possession in that day. When he became of age his close-fisted father made no new arrangement with him, offered him no start, paid him no wages, and gave him no share in the produce of the fields. It was enough, in the father's estimation, that Henry would succeed to a large part of the property at his death. But Henry, on mature reflection, had made up his mind that emigration would be better than a reversionary interest that must be postponed to the death of so robust a man as his father, who was yet in middle-life and who came of a stock remarkable for longevity. Was not his grandfather yet alive in Pennsylvania, while his great-grandfather had not been dead many years? It was after calculating the "expectation of life" in the Miller family that Henry notified his father of his intention to go where land was cheap and open a large farm for himself. In vain the father urged that he could not get on without him, and that there would be no one to look after things if the father should die. Henry persisted that he must do something for himself and that his father would have to hire a man, for he should surely leave as soon as the crops were gathered, so as to get land enough open in some frontier country to afford him a small crop of corn the first year.
Henry's mother and sisters were even more opposed to his going than his father was, and they did not hesitate to blame the senior Miller with great severity for not having "done something" for Henry. Henry's father had never before known how unpleasant a man's home may come to be. He was reminded that Henry had not an acre, nor even a colt, that he could call his own, and that other farmers had done better than that. This state of siege became presently quite intolerable, and the elder Miller resolved not only "to do something" for Henry, but to do it in such a way that his son would begin life very well provided for. He wanted to silence the clamor of the house and the neighborhood once for all, and prove to his critics how much they were mistaken.
It was about a week after Henry's first resolution was taken that he and his father were finishing the corn-gathering. They were throwing the unshucked ears into a great wagon of the Pennsylvania pattern—a wagon painted blue, the "bed" of which rose in a great sweep at each end as though some reminiscence of the antique forms of marine architecture had affected its construction. When all the corn within easy throwing distance had been gathered, Henry, who was on the near side, would slip the reins from the standard over the fore wheel and drive forward the horses, which even in moving bit off the ends of corn ears or nibbled at the greenest-looking blades within their reach.
"Let's put on the sideboards," said the elder, "and we can finish the field this load." Though Miller's ancestors had come to this country with the Palatine immigration, away back in 1710, there was a little bit of German in his accent; he said something like "gorn" for corn. The sideboards were put up, and these were so adjusted that when they were on the wagon the inclosing sides were rendered level at the top and capable of holding nearly double the load contained without the boards.