Finally, both having thoroughly repressed and denied and repulsed themselves, merely because they had been taught in youth that uncomfortable restraint was a precious privilege and a sacred duty, Mrs. Hayn broke the silence by exclaiming,-- “It does beat all.” “What does?” asked her husband, as solicitously as if he had not the slightest idea of what was absorbing his wife’s thoughts. “Why, that Phil don’t write. Here’s everybody in town tormentin’ me to know when he’s comin’ back, an’ if he’s got the things they asked him to buy for ’em, an’ not a solitary word can I say; we don’t even know how to send a letter to him to stir him up an’ remind him that he’s got parents.” “Well, ther’s sure to be a letter somewheres on the way, I don’t doubt, tellin’ us all we want to know,” said the old man, going through the motions of budding an althea-bush, in the angle of the step, from a scion of its own stock. “‘Watched pots never bile,’ you know, an’ ’tain’t often one gets a letter till he stops lookin’ for it.” “But ’tain’t a bit like Phil,” said the old lady. “Why, he’s been away more’n a week. I thought he’d at least let us know which of the big preachers he heerd on Sunday, an’ what he thought of ’em. Hearin’ them big guns of the pulpit was always one of the things he wanted to go to the city for. Then there’s the bread-pan I’ve been wantin’ for ten years,--one that’s got tin enough to it not to rust through every time there comes a spell of damp weather: he might at least rest my mind for me by lettin’ me know he’d got it.” “All in good time, old lady; let’s be patient, an’ we’ll hear all we’re waitin’ for. Worry’s more weary in’ than work. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.” “For mercy’s sake, Reuben, what’s Rome got to do with our Phil? I don’t see that Rome’s got anythin’ to do with the case, onless it’s somethin’ like New York, where our boy is.” “Well, Rome was built an’ rebuilt a good many times, you see, ’fore it got to be all that was ’xpected of it: an’ our Phil’s goin’ through the same operation, mebbe. A man’s got to be either a stupid savage or a finished-off saint to be suddenly pitched from fields and woods into a great big town without bein’ dazed. When _I_ first went down to York, my eyes was kept so wide open that I couldn’t scarcely open my mouth for a few days, much less take my pen in hand, as folks say in letters. I hardly knowed which foot I was standin’ on, an’ sometimes I felt as if the ground was gone from under me. Yet New York ground is harder than an onbeliever’s heart.” Mrs. Hayn seemed to accept the simile of Rome’s building as applied to her son, for she made no further objection to it; she continued, however, to polish her glasses, in anticipation of what she still longed to do with them. Her husband continued to make tiny slits and cross-cuts in the althea’s bark, and to insert buds carefully cut from the boughs. Finally he remarked, as carelessly as if talking about the weather,--