"I hope you are not going just because we came," said Mrs. Blakemore to Milford. "George, do take that rocker and sit down. You look so tired. Go away, Bobbie. You are such a pest." A straining voice in the sitting-room and the tin-pan tones of a piano were hushed, and out upon the veranda came several women. Milford was introduced to them. Some of them advanced with a smile, and some hung back in a sweet dread of danger. Milford sat down on a corner of the veranda with his feet on the ground. A wagon load of beer-drinkers, singing lustily, drove past the house. From the lake came the report of a gun, some one firing at a loon. There seemed to be no law to enforce respect for the day which the Puritan called Sabbath, and which the austerity of his creed had made so cold and cheerless. On Sunday night there had been a hop on the shore of the lake, and a constable had danced with a skillet-wiper from town. The children of the New Englander sell their winter piety for the summer dollar. "I can't conceive of anything more delicious than this atmosphere," said Mrs. Blakemore. "It's heavenly down by the lake. And in the woods there are such beautiful ferns. Are you fond of ferns, Mr. Milford?" "Don't believe I ever ate any," Milford answered, and the women screamed with laughter. One of them spoke of such charming impudence, and George looked at her with his cankered eye. Mrs. Stuvic said, "Oh, you keep still!" The Dutch girl passed at a spraddling gallop, setting a dog at a chicken condemned to death. Old Lewson shouted and shrank behind a tree. Mrs. Blakemore's thin hand was seen in the air. It was a command, and silence fell. "Would you mind telling us something of the wild life in the West?" "There's no wild life in the West now," Milford answered. "It is there, as it is nearly everywhere, a round of stale dishonesty." "George, dear, do you hear that? Stale dishonesty! Really, there is thought in that. Western men are so apt in their phrasing. They aren't afraid of critical judgment. But they are too picturesque to be simple. They are like an old garden run to blossoming weeds--the impudent new springing from the venerable old. Did you hear me, George?" "How's that?" George asked, looking up from a dream of trouble.