"Waäl, only tol'able, Doctor. That nigh ox, what with spring work an' grass feed is gittin' kind o' thin in the flesh. Any news abaout, Doctor?"
"Not that I learn, Mr. Pettibone. We're having fine growing weather for your crops."
"Waäl, only tol'able, Doctor. You see, arter them heavy spring rains, the sun has kind o' baked the graound; the seed don't seem to start well. I don't know as you remember, but in '29, along in the spring, we had jist sich a spell o' wet, an' corn hung back that season amazin'ly."
"Well, Mr. Pettibone, we must hope for the best: it's all in God's hands."
"Waäl, I s'pose it is, Doctor,—I s'pose it is." And he makes a cut at a clover-head with the lash upon his ox-goad; then—as if in recognition of the change of subject—he says,—
"Any more talk on the street abaout repairin' the ruff o' the meetin'-house, Doctor?"
At sundown, all visits being paid, they go jogging into town again,—the Doctor silent by this time, and thinking of his sermon, Dobbins is tied always at the same post,—always the hitch-rein buckled in the third hole from the end.
After tea, perhaps, Phil and Rose come sauntering by, and ask if Adèle will go up 'to the house'? Which request, if Miss Eliza meet it with a nod of approval, puts Adèle by their side: Rose, with a beautiful recklessness common to New England girls of that day, wearing her hat drooping half down her neck, and baring her clear forehead to the falling night-dews. Phil, with a pebble in his hand, makes a feint of throwing into a flock of goslings that are waddling disturbedly after a pair of staid old geese, but is arrested by Rose's prompt "Behave, Phil!"
The Squire is reading his paper by the evening lamp, but cannot forbear a greeting to Adèle:—
"Ah, here we are again! and how is Madamòizel?" (this is the Squire's style of French,)—"and has she brought me the peony? Phil would have given his head for it,—eh, Phil?"