“Two girls, that’s all; one handsome as blazes, like her mother, and the other—wa’all, she is nice-lookin’, with a motherly, venerable kind of face that everybody trusts. She stays to hum, Dorcas does, while——” Here he was interrupted by Rex, who, more interested just then in the farm than in the girls, asked if it was for sale.
“For sale?” Phineas replied. “I’d smile to see the Square sell his farm, though he owes a pile on it; borrows of Peter to pay Paul, you know, and so keeps a-goin’; but I don’t believe he’d sell for love nor money.”
“Not if he could get cash down and, say, a thousand more than it is worth?” Rex suggested.
Staggered by the thousand dollars, which seemed like a fortune to one who had never had more than a few hundred at a time in his life, Phineas gasped:
“One thousand extry! Wa-all, I swan, a thousand extry would tempt some men to sell their souls; but I don’t know about it fetchin’ the Square. Think of buyin’ it?”
Rex said he did.
“For yourself?”
“Yes, for myself.”
“You goin’ to turn farmer?” and Phineas looked him over from head to foot. “Wa-all, if that ain’t curi’s. I’d smile to see you, or one of your New York dudes, a-farmin’ it, with your high collars, your long coats and wide trouses and yaller shoes and canes and eye-glasses, and hands that never done a stroke of hard work in your lives. Yes, I would.”
Rex had never felt so small in his life as when Phineas was drawing a picture he recognized as tolerably correct of most of his class, and he half wished his collar was a trifle lower and his coat a little shorter, but he laughed good-humoredly and said, “I am afraid we do seem a useless lot to you, and I suppose we might wear older-fashioned clothes, but I can’t help the glasses. I couldn’t see across the street without them.”