Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn-row through the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a squat and shapeless figure.
"Good-morning," he called cheerily.
"Morgen," she said, looking up at him with a startled and very red face. She was German in every line of her body.
"Ich bin Herr McLane," he said, after a pause.
"So?" she replied, with a questioning inflection.
"Yah; ich bin Herr Grant's Bruder."
"Ach, so!" she said, with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick Inglish. No spick Inglis."
"Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the house, which was what he really wanted to see.
"Ich bin hier geboren."
"Ach, so!" She recognized the little bit of sentiment, and said some sentences in German whose general meaning was sympathy. She took him to the cool cellar where the spring had been trained to run into a tank containing pans of cream and milk; she gave him a cool draught from a large tin cup, and at his request went with him upstairs. The house was the same, but somehow seemed cold and empty. It was clean and sweet, but it showed so little evidence of being lived in. The old part, which was built of logs, was used as best room, and modelled after the best rooms of the neighboring "Yankee" homes, only it was emptier, without the cabinet organ and the rag-carpet and the chromos.