“Bathrooms?” I suggested.
The old man spat again. “Brook makes a pool sometimes down yander,” he replied, jerking his thumb.
“Suppose we take a look into the house?” suggested the professor.
The old man moved languidly from the door. As he stepped, his old black trouser leg pulled up over his shoe top, and we saw that he wore no stockings. He paused in front of the motor car. “How much did thet benzine buggy cost?” he asked.
“Four thousand dollars,” said the owner.
The gray eyes darted a look into the professor’s face; then they became enigmatic. “Powerful lot o’ money,” he mused, moving on. “Whar’s yourn?” he added to me.
“If I had one of those, I couldn’t have your farm,” said I.
He squinted shrewdly. “Dunno’s yer kin, anyway, do ye?” was his reply.
He now led us into the kitchen. We saw the face of the old lady peering at us from the “butt’ry.” A modern range was backed up against a huge, old-fashioned brick oven, no longer used. A copper pump, with a brass knob on the curved handle, stood at one end of the sink–“Goes ter the well,” said Milt. The floor was of ancient, hardwood planking, now worn into polished ridges. A door led up a low step into the main house, which consisted, downstairs, of two rooms, dusty and disused, to the left, and two similar rooms, used as bedrooms, to the south (all four containing fireplaces), and a hall, where a staircase with carved rail led to the hall above, flanked by four chambers, each with its fireplace, too. Over the kitchen was a long, unfinished room easily converted into a servant’s quarters. Secretly pleased beyond measure at the excellent preservation of the interior, I kept a discreet silence, and with an air of great wisdom began my inspection of the farm.
Twenty acres of the total thirty were on the side of the road with the house, and the lot was almost square–about three hundred yards to a side. Down along the brook the land had been considered worthless. South of the orchard it had grown to sugar maple for a brief space, then to young pine, evidently seedlings of some big trees now cut down, with a little tamarack swamp in the far corner. The pines again ran up the southern boundary from this swamp. The brook flowed cheerily below the orchard, wound amid the open grove of maples, and went with a little drop over green stones into the dusk of the pines. The rest of the land, which lay up a slope to a point a little west of the house and then extended along a level plateau, was either pasture or good average tillage, fairly heavy, with subsoil enough to hold the dressing. It had, however, I fancied, been neglected for many years, like the tumbling stone walls which bounded it, and which also enclosed a four or five acre hayfield occupying the entire southwestern corner of the lot, on the plateau. The professor, who married a summer estate as well as a motor car, confirmed me in this. Behind the barn, on the other side of the road, the rectangular ten-acre lot was rough second-growth timber by the brook, and cow pasture all up the slope and over the plateau.