There was a groan from the front seat.
"Do you often get it as bad as that, Lizzie?" asked John anxiously.
"Remember The Rowdy, Lizzie?" asked Charles Stuart, "the fellow that used to sing in the hawthorn bush?"
"I should think I do—and Granny Teeter. Listen, there is The Rowdy's lineal descendant, for sure!"
It seemed to be The Rowdy's very reincarnation, singing and shouting from an elm bough by the roadside.
"That's a gay bachelor all right," said John Coulson, who, because he was so supremely happy in his married life, had to make allusion to his condition as often as possible, even if only by way of contrast.
"He sounds more like a widower," said Elizabeth gloomily; "one that had been bereaved about a year."
"Hush, hush, Betsey!" cried her brother-in-law. "Remember whose land he's on."
"That's just what I am remembering."
"You don't mean that Jake's beginning to 'take notice,' surely?" asked John Gordon, in wicked delight. For only the spring before poor worn-out Mrs. Martin had suddenly ceased her baking, churning, and hoeing, and had gone to her long rest in the Forest Glen churchyard, and already rumor said that Jake was on the lookout for another baker, churner, and hoer.