"But I tell you it fills the house!"
"Well, it'll have to a spell yet," said Barby, "'cause if it didn't, you see, Capt. Rossitur, there'd be nothing to fill Fleda's chickens with."
"Chickens!--where's all the corn in the land?"
"It's some place besides in our barn," said Barby. "All last year's is out, and Mr. Didenhover ha'n't fetched any of this year's home; so I made a bargain with 'em they shouldn't starve as long as they'd eat boiled pursley."
"What do you give them?"
"'Most everything--they ain't particler now-a days--chunks o' cabbage, and scarcity, and pun'kin and that--all the sass that ain't wanted."
"And do they eat that?"
"Eat it!" said Barby. "They don't know how to thank me for't!"
"But it ought to be done out of doors," said Charlton, coming back from a kind of maze in which he had been listening to her. "It is unendurable!"
"Then I guess you'll have to go some place where you won't know it," said Barby;--"that's the most likely plan I can hit upon; for it'll have to stay on till it's ready."