“I want to know,” Phineas said. “Wa-all, they ain’t bad on you, they’re so clear and hain’t no rims to speak of. They make you look like a literary feller, or more like a minister. Be you a professor?”
Rex flushed a little at the close questioning, expecting to be asked next how much he was worth and where his money was invested, but he answered honestly, “I wish I could say yes, but I can’t.”
“What a pity! Come to one of our meetin’s, and we’ll convert you in no time. What persuasion be you?”
Reginald said he was an Episcopalian, and Phineas’s face fell. He hadn’t much faith in Episcopalians, thinking their service was mere form, with nothing in it which he could enjoy, except that he did not have to sit still long enough to get sleepy, and there were so many places where he could come in strong with an Amen, as he always did. This opinion, however, he did not express to Reginald. He merely said, “Wa-all, there’s good folks in every church. I do b’lieve the Square is pious, and he’s a ’Piscopal. Took it from his Georgy wife, who had a good many other fads. You have a good face, like all the Hallams, and I b’lieve they died in the faith. Says so, anyway, on their tombstones; but monuments lie as well as obituaries. But I ain’t a-goin’ to discuss religious tenants, though I’m fust-rate at it, they say. I want to know what you want of a farm?”
Rex told him that he had long wished for a place in the country, where he could spend a part of each year with a few congenial friends, hunting and fishing and boating, and from what he had heard of the Homestead, he thought it would just suit him, there were so many hills and woods and ponds around it.
“Are there pleasant drives?” he asked, and Phineas replied:
“Tip-top, the city folks think. Woods full of roads leading nowhere except to some old house a hundred years old or more, and the older they be the better the city folks like ’em. Why, they actu’lly go into the garrets and buy up old spinning-wheels and desks and chairs; and, my land, they’re crazy over tall clocks.”
Rex did not care much for the furniture of the old garrets unless it should happen to belong to the Hallams, and he asked next if there were foxes in the woods, and if he could get up a hunt with dogs and horses.
Phineas did not smile, but laughed long and loud, and deluged the cuspidor, before he replied:
“Wa-all, if I won’t give up! A fox-hunt, with hounds and horses, tearin’ through the folks’s fields and gardens! Why, you’d be mobbed. You’d be tarred and feathered. You’d be rid on a rail.”