We went on thataway a good while into the summer and nothing much happened between us and our neighbors. Maybe once in a while our dog Peanut would get over in their back yard and scratch up their pansies. Peanut always liked to lay in fresh dirt, and he seemed to know instinctive which was our pansy beds and which was theirn. Their hired man only laughed when I seen him and apologized.
He used to come over once in a while, their hired man did, and meet me on the dock back of the boathouse, where I give him lessons in roping. I showed him a few things—how to let go when he got his rope straight, and to give hisself plenty of double back of the hondoo. We used to rope the snubbing posts where we tied the boats. Sometimes we'd practice for a hour or so and he begun to get on right well. We visited that way several days, usual of mornings.
"Don't the lady ever come down to the boats no more?" says he one time.
"No," says I. "Her pa's afraid she'll get drownded."
"Does she ever talk about saving the life of anybody?" he ast.
"No," I says; "she's used to such things. She don't take no account anyways of saving the life of a laboring man," says I. "It's nothing to her."
"Ain't it funny," says he, "how things work out sometimes? At first, you know, I thought she was one of your housemaids."
"You done what?" says I.
"Well, I don't deny it. When I first seen her in the yard, the time she chased that dog over, I thought she was one of the maids—you see, she had on a cap and a apern. I didn't know at all. The old lady thinks it yet."
"She's mighty kind-hearted, even with the lower classes," says I. "She even gives money to them people that play music in front of our house every morning. I wish they wouldn't."