And how Nathan Thacher hustled those long hot summer days! How, from daylight to sunsetting, he delved and toiled in his fields, working miracles in them with slow stubborn courage! He lost courage once or twice, but Millia never knew it. She watched his eager determined face steadily, and always read quiet resolution in it, and, as the weeks multiplied to months, a new expression of self-respect that delighted her soul. "Thanny's losing his old down-spirited looks," she would muse happily over her work. "He holds up his head straight and kind of proud now; but, my goodness me, how he is working!" And Millia, too, worked. She hurried through with her house duties, and went out to the fields with Nathan to do whatever lighter work he would let her do out there. Side by side the brother and sister toiled, seeing the waste places bloom under their eyes, and gradually the rough acres smooth out into beautiful thrifty corn rows. Millia walked between them in cool evenings, and let her skirts flip the tiny stalks gently. They grew tall, and she could nudge them in friendly greeting as she passed down and up between them. Of course all this success came only out of the hardest possible wrestling with nature. There went before it weeks of mighty work with drag and pick, wresting out rocks and uprooting stumps and weeds. Only Grandfather Thacher's grim persistence, descended like a mantle on Nathan's aching young shoulders, carried those hard days. The neighbors helped at odd times, and Nathan repaid them in rainy intervals. So at last the two big fields were smooth and ready for the ploughing, that left them seamed with long ridges wavering gently away into perspective. How good the upturned earth had smelled to Millia! She stood outside and drew in long satisfying whiffs of it. It was so good to see the old place thriving at last--to smell it and watch it and be proud of it. Millia forgot all about the gold-mine some days. Nathan never did. He repaired the fences to keep intruders out. He drew out loads upon loads of dressing for his land from stores of hitherto wasted fertility beneath the old barns. He nurtured and tended and worked unstintingly, but always with the glitter of the gold grains in his rocks before his eyes. Nathan never forgot. He studied books on mining in the evening until his tired head nodded over the blurring letters. Once, when the corn was all planted, and there was a little interval of rest, he went to a city, a day's trip distant, and had his little samples of glistening rock assayed. It was when he came home from that journey that Millia thought she could detect a little look of disappointment in his face, and perhaps a faint crestfallen note in his voice. But she forgot about it soon, because they were so busy weeding the corn rows.