"At once."
"At once! You'd come in the middle of cooking some pastry and want a woman to put patches on a dirty old pair of trousers, and then want to know why the dinner wasn't up to tick; and besides, it's Carry's week in the house."
For Dawn's sake I would have offered to do the patching, but feared Uncle Jake might suspect me of matrimonial designs upon him, such being the conceit of old men.
"I never go to Carry," he snapped, "an' it's a pity your mother wasn't alive instead of you, she could put a patch on in five minutes any time you asked her, but she never spent her time in roarin' and bellerin' round after a vote;" and so saying Uncle Jake disappeared, leaving his grandniece with her pretty pink cheeks deepened to scarlet, and a spark in her blue eyes.
"The old dog! if he wasn't grandma's brother I'd hate him. It's always these crawling old things who can do nothing themselves, and have to be kept by a woman, who are always the worst at trying to make women's position lower, and talk about them as inferior. He's always after a woman to do this and to do that, and comparing her—I'd like to see the woman, mother or father—who could put a patch on those pants in five minutes."
"There's one way it could be done in the time," I said, calling to mind a prank related by a gay little friend—"clap it on with cobbler's wax."
Dawn's eyes danced, and the irritation receded from the corners of the pretty mouth as, procuring a piece of cloth and a lump of cobbler's wax, she did the deed in less than five minutes, and Uncle Jake contentedly received his trousers, while I departed to put in some more time with my friend Andrew, without telling her there might be a sequel to patching trousers with cobbler's wax.
"Well, Andrew, how goes the scrubbing?"
"Oh, great! Look at that!" said he, drawing back to exhibit a really clean table; and as it would not have conduced to our friendship had I pointed out that it had been arrived at at the expense of slushing the lime-washed wall and the stand of the separator, I wisely kept silent.
"There! I reckon me grandma nor Jim Clay neither never done a table better," he said with enviable self-appreciation. "You know I reckon them old yarns about the people bein' so good w'en they was young is a little too thin to stand washin'—don't you? You've only got to take the things the wonderful Jim Clay and me grandma done w'en they was courtin',—you get her on a string to tell you,—an' if Dawn done the same with any of the blokes now, she'd jolly soon hear about it; an' as for old Jake there, I reckon I'd be able to put him through meself at his own age—don't you? Anyhow, I'm full of farmin'. It's only fools an' horses sweat themselves, all the others go in for auctioneering, or parliament, or something, and have a fine screw comin' in for nothing."