As a rule, the hired girl and the hired man are not good friends: he derides her, and she scorns him. "I do expise that Bill Blowers: he don't know beans when the bag's untied. He's as bashful as nothing," says she. She likes the farm-hand by the day: she often visits his cotland on the edge of a woods. He really is a man to respect, knows a reason for the crooks in the mully scythe and in the light cradle's snath, and can tell the time of day by holding his hoe-handle straight in the sunshine and looking at its shadow on the ground. The hired girl particularly hates the Scotch hired man, a fellow with a face like a wig-block, white hair and eyebrows, and a working-suit made apparently of old snuff-rags and flatiron-holders. He keeps his eye on the blue-ringed cider pitcher of winter evenings, and, to the huge disgust of his comrades, drinks up the vial of cider vinegar placed in the pail with the boiled potatoes and sweet, buttery pork which form their lunch when they go to the forest chopping. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that an awkward man is graceful when he is asleep or at work or agreeably amused. It is perfectly evident that Emerson has never seen the Scotch hired man. When _he_ is asleep his knurly limbs are twisted to an indescribable pitch, his right elbow under his head, his left in the small of his back; when at work he humps himself out of all proportion; and when agreeably amused he canters about as does a new-born calf with its legs thrust out at different angles.