"I like the sailor lingo," he said, curling his moustache, and turning over his pink shirt-collar. "They've a loose dash about 'em. It must go far with the girls."
Then he looked at the wagon again, and at a pinchbeck watch he carried.
"Five. No matter how neat an' easy a fellow's dress is, it's wasted this time in the mornin'. Them street-car conductors hev a chance for it all day, dang 'em!"
He went back to the house as softly as possible, and brought out a lantern, which was silver-mounted and of cut glass. He hung it carefully in the wagon.
"There's no knowin' what use I may have for it,"—shaking his head, and rubbing it tenderly.
Andy had owned that lantern for several years, and carried it with him always. "You cannot know, Jane," he used to say to the woman whom he worked for, "what a comfort I find in it. It"—He always stopped there, and she never replied, but immediately talked of something else. Their customers (for they kept half a dozen cows on the place, and Andy took the milk into town)—their customers, when they found out about the lantern, used to look oddly at Andy, and one or two of them had tried in consequence to overreach him in the bills. But no thimble-rigger had a keener eye for the cents than Fawcett. So their milk-speculation had prospered, until, this spring, they had added to their stock of cows. It was the only business in which Andy was partner; after he brought the wagon back at noon, he put on his flannel shirt, and worked as a hired hand for the woman; the other produce she sold herself.
The house was low, built of lichen-covered stone, an old buttonwood-tree tenting it over; in the sunny back-yard you could see fat pullets and glossy-backed Muscovy ducks wabbling in and out through the lilac-bushes. Comfortable and quaint the old place looked, with no bald white paint about it, no unseemly trig new fences to jar against the ashen and green tones of color in house and woods. The gate by which you passed through the stone wall was made of twisted boughs; and wherever a tree had been cut down, the stump still stood, covered with crimson-leaved ivy. "I'd like things nattier," Andy used to say; "but it's Jane's way."
The Quaker woman herself, as she stood in the gateway in her gray clothes, the hair pushed back from her sallow face, her brown, muscular arms bare, suited the quiet, earnest look of the place.
"Thee'll take neighbor Wart into town, Andrew?" she said.