"Well, it wouldn't help you much, my dear," said the Idiot, "but the wash-lady would hail with unmixed delight a substitute for her mouth to hold clothes-pins in while she is hanging out the clothes. I watched Ellen in the yard for ten minutes that day, and it was pathetic. There she was, standing on her tiptoes, hanging innumerable garments on the line, her mouth full of clothes-pins, and Jimpsonberry's hired man leaning over the fence trying to shout sweet nothings in her ear. If she had had a nice little basket-hat on her head to hold the pins in she could have answered back without stopping her work every other minute to take them out of her mouth in order to retort to his honeyed sentiments."
Mrs. Idiot laughed. "Ellen finds time enough to talk and do the washing, too," she said. "I sometimes think she does more talking than washing."
"No doubt of it; she's only human, like the rest of us," said the Idiot. "But she might save time to do something else for us if she could do the washing and the talking at the same time. She may give up the washing, but she'll never give up the talking. Therefore, why not make the talking easier?"
"What you need most, I think," put in Mr. Brief, "is an instrument to keep hired men from leaning over the fence and distracting the attention of the laundress from her work. That would be a great boon."
"Not unless idleness is a great boon," retorted the Idiot. "Half the hired men I know would be utterly out of employment if they couldn't lean over a fence and talk to somebody. Leaning over a fence and talking to somebody forms seventy-five per cent. of the hired man's daily labor. He seems to think that is what he is paid for. Still, any one who objects could very easily remedy the conversational detail in so far as it goes on over the fence."
"By the use of barbed wire, I presume," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"By something far more subtle and delicately suggestive," rejoined the Idiot. "Hired men do not mind barbed-wire fences. They rather like them when they annoy other people. When they annoy themselves they know how to treat them. My own man Mike, for instance, minds them not at all. Indeed, he has taken my pruning-shears and clipped all the barbs off the small stretch of it we had at the rear end of our lot to keep him from climbing over for a short cut home."
"With what result?" asked Mr. Brief.
