"Pa, I had a new boy to help me milk this evenin'."
This bit of information imparted by Miss Lucy, when after the early supper, while Miss Nancy attended to the dishes, she and her father sat around the sitting-room grate with their guests, was met by an infectious trill of laughter from the minister's wife.
"O Glen," she gurgled, "you would have been a widower this evening if the milk-bucket had not saved me! I went on the wrong side of Miss Lucy's black cow and raised her ire. She raised her foot, Miss Lucy said, but I think it must have been her feet!"
"I am afraid you won't do for a chore boy," laughed her husband, "if you begin by antagonizing the cows. Have you in view any more suitable boy, Miss Lucy?"
The question of a small boy to be paid for his services in food and in raiment, was a constant and unsettled one in the James family. Five youths had been its portion in one year, and the last one had left by the light of the moon two weeks before.
"No," Miss Lucy looked away from her father as she spoke: "Cousin Becky Willis told me where she thought I could get one, and I tried today, but the childern are all goin' to school—"
"Hit's hard to git a boy to stay," interrupted Mr. James, smiling affably at the minister, "but I shan't let the girls do the work by theirselves no way this winter. I've got the promise o' a mighty good man."
"Who've you got, Pa,—Mr. Lindsay?" hazarded Miss Nancy as she economically extinguished the small lamp she had just brought in from the kitchen, and slightly lowered the flame of the large one on the mantel.
"Yes, Lindsay," assented her father. A little pleased gasp escaped Miss Lucy, but no one noticed it but little Mrs. Avery, sitting next her.
"Lindsay, he come by here this mornin' a goin' to my nephew, Simeon Willises, and stopped a few minutes. He's lookin' mighty puny: said he hain't felt well all this fall, not sence he got p'izened with Paris green in Archie Evans' terbaccer last August. Archie, he would have him to spray fer him, wantin' a man o' jedgement to do hit. Lindsay's been plumb laid up fer about two weeks, he said. I told him he ort to 'a' come here and staid while he wuz laid up, but he's been a stayin' at Doggett's.