There had been other houses painted on the street that spring. More fences had been reset and straightened. The driveway itself had had some attention from the town. And you couldn't have found a one-hinged gate the entire length of the street! As for Uncle Jason, he was really carrying on his farming in a businesslike way. Marty was getting to be a big boy now, and he could help more than he once had. Janice had suggested to Uncle Jason that, as he had such good pasture at the upper end of his farm, and as the milk supply of Poketown was but a meager one, it would pay somebody to run a small dairy. Mr. Day now had three cows that he proposed to winter, and was raising one heifer calf. Such milk as the family did not use themselves the neighbors gladly bought. Mrs. Day was doing better with her hens, too. The wire fencing had been repaired and she gave the biddies more attention; therefore she was being repaid in eggs and chickens for frying. Altogether it could no longer be said that the Day family was shiftless. Janice received several cheerful and entertaining letters that summer from Nelson Haley. He was clerk of a summer hotel on the Maine shore, and he seemed to be having a good time as well as earning a considerable salary. When the new school committee of Poketown tendered him an offer of the head mastership of the school (he was to begin with one assistant for the kindergartners), he threw up his clerkship and hastened to a certain summer normal school in central Massachusetts. Janice was very glad, although his action surprised her, knowing, as she did, how much young Haley needed the money he was earning at the hotel. His tuition at the summer school for a month, and his board there, would eat up a good deal of the money he had saved. He might not be able to enter for his law studies at the end of another school year. Janice believed, however, that Nelson Haley was "cut out," as the local saying was, for a teacher. He had an easy, interesting manner, which was bound to hold the attention of even the wandering minds among his pupils. She knew by the improvement in Marty that the young man's influence, especially on the boys of Poketown, was for good. "If he would only make up his mind to _work_, he might rise high in the profession," she thought. "Some day he might even be president of a college--and wouldn't that be fine?" But she did not write anything of this nature to the absent Nelson. She treasured in her mind what he had said about working because _she_ was proud of him; and she wisely decided that Nelson Haley was a young man who needed very little encouragement in some ways. Janice was by no means sure that she liked Nelson Haley as he liked her. So she kept her answers to his letters upon a coolly friendly basis and only showed him, when he returned to Poketown in September in time for the dedication exercises of the school building, how glad she was to see him by the warmth of her greeting.