"I'm looking for a job."
"You want work on a farm?"
"Yes, that or any other kind of work that I can get."
"Well, there ain't much doing on the farms now. I don't know nobody that's looking for a hired man. There's Abe Potter, I heard him say as how he wanted to hire a man to work for him all winter; but Miss' Potter, she told my wife last night that he'd got Jim Hale's boy, Al, to live out to him. Say, did you ever work in the woods?"
"No."
"Well, there's plenty of work in the woods. It's a rough life, but it ain't so bad when you're used to it. I worked in the woods before I was married. I could go out to the woods now, and earn two dollars a day and my keep; but my wife wouldn't let me. And it's a pretty rough life, only I come to like it. But I've got my farm now, and my wife and children; and her old folks lives with us, and I've got to stay to home, and take care of things. Say, where are you going to-night?"
"I don't know. I'll try to find some place to stay where I can help with the work to pay for my keep; and then to-morrow I'll go to the woods, and try to get a job."
"I tell you, stranger, you stay at my house to-night, and in the morning you can go to English Centre. I guess you'll get a job on one of the camps."
My thanks could have expressed but little of the gratitude I felt. I shared his light-hearted mood at once, and was a very interested and attentive listener to the narrative of his early life; his disagreements with his father, and how he had inherited the farm from him burdened with debt, but had almost paid the mortgages, and had his eye now upon a neighbor's farm with a view to purchasing that.
He was singing again as we drove up the lane toward his home, and was plainly expectant. The cause was clear when two children, a girl and boy of about six and four, came running toward the wagon, with excited cries of welcome. They drew up sharply at sight of a stranger, and their father loudly greeted them with a medley of affectionate diminutives in English and German, until they lost their fear, and began to talk rapidly with him in the quaintest German, which sounded as though it might be one with the strange dialects which you see in Fliegende Blätter.