It was not many minutes before they pulled up in front of old Mr. Wire's big rambling old farm-house, and there were Jim and Sally Wire coming out to meet them. Old Mrs. Wire was in the doorway, and she looked twenty years younger as soon as they had a look at her husband. Mainly because the difference in their ages was a good deal more than that.
Nobody knew how tall Mr. Wire would have been if he had stood up, but the oldest old ladies around Lender's Mills village all said he'd had that stoop in his shoulders ever since they'd known him.
"My mother used to say," said Elder Meadows, "that old Wire's father was a short, stocky man, and built his log-house to fit himself, and so when his son got taller'n he was himself, he had to hold his head down, 'specially coming through the door."
There he was now, and the visitors had not been in the house five minutes before Salina Meadows told how much Jerry Buntley knew about sugar.
"His father sells tons of it, and his brother's a clerk in a sugar store, and his uncle's a book-keeper in a sugar refinery in the city—"
"Ten stories high!" put in Jerry, with a down look of modesty.
"—and he's seen sugar plantations, and molasses factories, and where they make all sorts of candy."
"You don't say!" exclaimed Mrs. Wire. "I'm glad you fetched him along."
"Wa'al, so'm I," said old Mr. Wire. "No man ain't ever too old to l'arn. I've only been a-b'ilin' sap for a leetle risin' of fifty year, and I don't know much. You're jest in time. The sun's lookin' down warm to-day, and we was jest a-wantin' to set out for the bush."
"It isn't the fur-away bush," said Mrs. Wire; "it's that there patch nighest the house. The trees ain't been tapped this five year, and they'll run the best kind."