"Yes, sir."
"And he plays the fiddle everywhere," volunteered the little girl, with ardent admiration. "If you hadn't been shut up sick just now, you'd have heard him yourself. He plays everywhere—everywhere he goes."
"Is that so?" murmured Jack politely, shuddering a little at what he fancied would come from a violin played by a boy like the one before him. (Jack could play the violin himself a little—enough to know it some, and love it more.) "Hm-m; well, and what else do you do?"
"Nothing, except to go for walks and read."
"Nothing!—a big boy like you—and on Simeon Holly's farm?" Voice and manner showed that Jack was not unacquainted with Simeon Holly and his methods and opinions.
David laughed gleefully.
"Oh, of course, REALLY I do lots of things, only I don't count those any more. 'Horas non numero nisi serenas,' you knew," he quoted pleasantly, smiling into the man's astonished eyes.
"Jack, what was that—what he said?" whispered the little girl. "It sounded foreign. IS he foreign?"
"You've got me, Jill," retorted the man, with a laughing grimace. "Heaven only knows what he is—I don't. What he SAID was Latin; I do happen to know that. Still"—he turned to the boy ironically—"of course you know the translation of that," he said.
"Oh, yes. 'I count no hours but unclouded ones'—and I liked that. 'T was on a sundial, you know; and I'M going to be a sundial, and not count, the hours I don't like—while I'm pulling up weeds, and hoeing potatoes, and picking up stones, and all that. Don't you see?"