“Why don’t yuh take them thar slug lumps an’ make a fence over thar?” she asked of Queeder for something like the thousandth time in ten years, referring to as many as thirty-five piles of the best and almost pure zinc lying along the edges of the nearest field, and piled there by Bursay,—this time because two bony cows had invaded one of their corn patches. The “slug lumps” to which she referred could not have been worth less than $2,000. For as many as the thousandth time he had replied: “Well, fer the land sakes, hain’t I never got nuthin’ else tuh do? Yuh’d think them thar blame-ding rocks wuz wuth more nor anythin’ else. I do well enough ez ’tis to git ’em outen the sile, I say, ‘thout tryin’ tuh make fences outen ’em.” “So yuh say—yuh lazy, good-fer-nuthin’ ole tobacco-chewin’ ——,” here a long list of expletives which was usually succeeded by a stove lid or poker or a fair-sized stick of wood, propelled by one party or the other, and which was as deftly dodged. Love and family affection, you see, due to unbroken and unbreakable propinquity, as it were. But to proceed: The hot and rainy seasons had come and gone in monotonous succession during a period of years, and the lumps still lay in the field. Dode, the eldest child and only son—a huge, hulking, rugged and yet bony ignoramus, who had not inherited an especially delicate or agreeable disposition from his harried parents—might have removed them had he not been a “consarned lazy houn’,” his father said, or like his father, as his mother said, and Jane, the daughter, might have helped, but these two partook of the same depressed indifference which characterized the father. And why not, pray? They had worked long, had had little, seen less and hoped for no particular outlet for their lives in the future, having sense enough to know that if fate had been more kind there might have been. Useless contention with an unyielding soil had done its best at hardening their spirits. “I don’t see no use ploughin’ the south patch,” Dode had now remarked for the third time this spring. “The blamed thing don’t grow nuthin’.” “Ef yuh only half ’tended it instid o’ settin’ out thar under them thar junipers pickin’ yer teeth an’ meditatin’, mebbe ’twould,” squeaked Mrs. Queeder, always petulant or angry or waspish—a nature soured by long and hopeless and useless contention. “No use shakin’ up a lot uv rocks, ez I see,” returned Dode, wearily and aimlessly slapping at a fly. “The hull place ain’t wuth a hill o’ beans,” and from one point of view he was right. “Why don’t yuh git off’n hit then?” suggested Queeder in a tantalizing voice, with no particular desire to defend the farm, merely with an idle wish to vary the monotony. “Ef hit’s good enough tuh s’port yuh, hit’s good enough to work on, I say.”