It was the hour at which Perkins usually left for home, but the old planter found him in. “Oh, it's you, Mr. Bishop,” he said, suavely, as he rose from his desk in the dingy, disordered little room with its single window. He pushed a chair forward. “Sit down; didn't know you were in town. At your brother's, I reckon. How are the crops up the road? Too much rain last month, I'm afraid.” Bishop sank wearily into the chair. He had tired himself out thinking over what he would say to the man before him and with the awful contemplation of what the man might say to him. “They are doin' as well as can be expected,” he made answer; but he didn't approve of even that platitude, for he was plain and outspoken, and hadn't come all that distance for a mere exchange of courtesies. Still, he lacked the faculty to approach easily the subject which had grown so heavy within the last twenty-four hours, and of which he now almost stood in terror. “Well, that's good,” returned Perkins. He took up a pen as he resumed his seat, and began to touch it idly to the broad nail of his thumb. He was a swarthy man of fifty-five or sixty, rather tall and slender, with a bald head that sloped back sharply from heavy, jutting brows, under which a pair of keen, black eyes shone and shifted. “Come down to see your daughter,” he said. “Good thing for her that you have a brother in town. By-the-way, he's a fine type of a man. He's making headway, too; his trade is stretching out in all directions--funny how different you two are! He seems to take to a swallow-tail coat and good cigars like a duck to water, while you want the open sky above you, sweet-smelling fields around, an' fishing, hunting, sowing, reaping, and chickens--fat, juicy ones, like your wife fried when I was there. And her apple-butter! Ice-cream can' t hold a candle to it.” “I 'lowed I'd see William 'fore I went back,” said Bishop, rather irrelevantly, and, for the lack of something else to do, he took out his eye-glasses and perched them on his sharp nose, only, on discovering the inutility of the act, to restore them clumsily to his pocket. He was trying to persuade himself, in the silence that followed, that, if the lawyer had known of his trade with the Tompkins heirs, he would naturally have alluded to it. Then, seeing that Perkins was staring at him rather fixedly, he said--it was a verbal plunge: “I bought some more timber-land yesterday!” “Oh, you did? That's good.” Perkins's eyes fluttered once or twice before his gaze steadied itself on the face of the man before him. “Well, as I told you, Mr. Bishop, that sort of a thing is a good investment. I reckon it's already climbing up a little, ain't it?” “Not much yet.” It struck Bishop that he had given the lawyer a splendid opportunity to speak of the chief cause for an advance in value, and his heart felt heavier as he finished. “But I took quite a slice the last time--five thousand acres at the old figure, you know--a dollar a acre.”