When found Jim looked at it with dismay. The handle was fairly good but the steel part was broken in half and practically worthless.
“Reckon Wesley, my eldest son, must have been using it. He’s always trying to ‘make something.’ I think he’ll be a great inventor by and by. But really, it doesn’t seem hospitable—it isn’t, to let you or any other guest work. I can manage very well, very well, indeed. You can sit and read. We have a Shakespeare—what the children haven’t destroyed—a Bible, and two volumes of Scott. We’re real proud of our library and I keep it in my wedding chest. I have to, the children are so bright and inquiring.”
“Too inquiring I think! ’Tain’t healthy for ’em to be quite so smart!”
Jim laughed, shouldered his hoe, and marched away across the little strip of grass between the house and garden—so-called. The ground for this Lucetta’s feeble hands had dug with a spade that matched in condition the hoe Jim had found. Melon seeds had been sown there and had duly sprouted. But the “inquiring” minds of the children had daily pulled them up to see if there were any melons at the root. The potatoes had received the same treatment, the corn ditto, and the wonder was that even a few plants had survived their efforts to “make ’em grow faster.”
Now here was Saint Augustine “helping” to transplant the celery which had until now escaped culture at their hands.
Jim worked as he had never done even in all his active young life. His heart ached with pity for the little woman who faced her hard life so bravely and so happily, and he was revolving many plans to help her, and to a greater extent than a few days of farm labor could do.
“’Cause I say, I know somethin’.”
“Well, what is it, Sainty?”
“Ain’t ‘Sainty’, but ‘Au—gus—tine’. Say it nice, like Mamma does. She cried last night.”