The barns were away down at the foot of the hill. Andrew's men usually all lived in the village, unless he happened to have hired strangers for the stress of harvest or haying, or in winter time when they were needed about the house.
Miss Myers, as the village phrased it, "kep' help regular," and often had up old Mrs. Greer from the village, for there was a deal of work to be done in that house.
For the rest, Andrew was a practical farmer; it had not occurred to him that he did not need to work so hard, and the active life did him no harm. He was up at daylight in summer, and by candle-light in winter.
He ploughed, sowed, reaped and threshed his grain. And when at the threshings he sat at the head of the long table, lined on each side with men "feeding like horses, when you hear them feed," he looked like some young chief among his serfs, albeit he wore blue jeans and flannel shirts as they did.
He did not know himself to be so different from his neighbours as he was, only he never seemed to contemplate marrying one of their women, and he pitied them. For they did not recognize the pathos of their own narrow lives. They did not see their surroundings as he did—the beauties of the skies above, and of the earth beneath, and the marvel and mystery of the water.
Andrew could not have said this was what made him pity them, for he was one of the inarticulate ones, whose speech is shackled; one of those, too, who know their own limitations in this way, and feel their fetters. At times they seemed to weigh his spirit down.
CHAPTER IV.
Andrew was eager to see Miss Moore again,—although he felt a masculine irritation against her for taking umbrage at well-meant and thoroughly sensible advice. Perhaps at the bottom of this there lay a soupçon of annoyance with himself, that he had spoken so abruptly to her upon the subject, mingled with a compassionate remembrance of what Mr. Morris had told him of her delicacy. He was very glad to find an excuse to go up to his woods, where they stretched past the Morris house; and a pretence that he was looking for suitable trees to cut down for foundations for his hay-stacks, justified him in his own eyes for strolling among his trees in very leisurely, but apparently disinterested fashion. He must, however, have been paying some attention to the house on his right, for when Mrs. Morris ran out from the old orchard behind the house to the barns, calling, "Father, Father, where are you? Come here, quick, do, hey Father!" Andrew promptly responded, leaping over the fence and speedily reaching her side.
"What's wrong?" he asked.