“Well that article was reprinted in all the big papers, from Boston to Chicago. I never knew any other thing from a little village paper to travel so far, or attract so much attention. I had lots of letters about it, too. That article was Seth’s—all his own. I didn’t change a word in it. And he’s hardly seen any thing of the world yet, either.”
The lawyer was heard chuckling, when John’s voice died away in the darkness. The cigars had long since burned out, and the men could with difficulty see one another. The two younger brothers waited, the one surprised, the other increasingly indignant, to learn the cause of Albert’s hilarity.
“Do you realise, John,” he said at last, with merriment still in his voice, “what a delightful commentary on Civil Service Reform your words make. The best article on that doctrine is written by a youngster who has never left the farm, who doesn’t know the difference between a Custom House and a letter-box on a lamp-post! Ho, ho, I must tell that to Chauncey when I see him.”
An hour later, John and Seth still leaned against the mossy curb, smoking and talking over the words of their elder brother, who sometime before had gone in to avoid the dew-fall.
“I wonder if we have misjudged him, after all,” said Seth. “I’m almost ashamed to accept his favors, after the way I pitched into him.”
“I wonder what his scheme really is,” mused the more experienced village editor.
CHAPTER VIII.—ALBERT’S PLANS.
It became generally known, before Sunday came again, that Albert was to take the farm, and that Seth was to go to the city—known not only along the rough, lonesome road leading over the Burfield hills, which had once been a proud turnpike, with hospitable taverns at every league, and the rumbling of great coaches and the horn of the Postboy as echoes of its daily life of bustle and profit, and now was a solitary thoroughfare to no place in particular, with three or four gaunt old farmhouses, scowling in isolation, to the mile—not only on this road, and at the four corners below, but even at Thessaly people learned of the coming change as if by magic, and discussed it as a prime sensation. It need not be added that the story grew greatly in telling—grew too ponderous to remain an entity, and divided itself into several varying and, ultimately, fiercely conflicting sections.