"Good piece of oats," yawned the stranger, listlessly. "That's barley." "So 'tis. Didn't notice." Uncle Ethan was wondering who the man was. He had some pots of black paint in the wagon, and two or three square boxes. "What do yeh think o' Cleveland's chances for a second term?" continued the man, as if they had been talking politics all the while. Uncle Ripley scratched his head. "Waal--I dunno--bein' a Republican--I think--" "That's so--it's a purty scaly outlook. I don't believe in second terms myself," the man hastened to say. "Is that your new barn acrosst there?" he asked, pointing with his whip. "Yes, sir, it is," replied the old man, proudly. After years of planning and hard work he had managed to erect a little wooden barn, costing possibly three hundred dollars. It was plain to be seen he took a childish pride in the fact of its newness. The stranger mused. "A lovely place for a sign," he said, as his eyes wandered across its shining yellow broadside. Uncle Ethan stared, unmindful of the bugs crawling over the edge of his pan. His interest in the pots of paint deepened. "Couldn't think o' lettin' me paint a sign on that barn?" the stranger continued, putting his locked hands around one knee, and gazing away across the pig-pen at the building. "What kind of a sign? Gol darn your skins!" Uncle Ethan pounded the pan with his paddle and scraped two or three crawling abominations off his leathery wrist. It was a beautiful day, and the man in the wagon seemed unusually loath to attend to business. The tired ponies slept in the shade of the lombardies. The plain was draped in a warm mist, and shadowed by vast, vaguely defined masses of clouds--a lazy June day. "Dodd's Family Bitters," said the man, waking out of his abstraction with a start, and resuming his working manner. "The best bitter in the market." He alluded to it in the singular. "Like to look at it? No trouble to show goods, as the fellah says," he went on hastily, seeing Uncle Ethan's hesitation. He produced a large bottle of triangular shape, like a bottle for pickled onions. It had a red seal on top, and a strenuous caution in red letters on the neck, "None genuine unless 'Dodd's Family Bitters' is blown in the bottom." "Here's what it cures," pursued the agent, pointing at the side, where, in an inverted pyramid, the names of several hundred diseases were arranged, running from "gout" to "pulmonary complaints," etc. "I gol! she cuts a wide swath, don't she?" exclaimed Uncle Ethan, profoundly impressed with the list. "They ain't no better bitter in the world," said the agent, with a conclusive inflection. "What's its speshy-ality? Most of 'em have some speshy-ality." "Well--summer complaints--an'--an'--spring an' fall troubles--tones ye up, sort of." Uncle Ethan's forgotten pan was empty of his gathered bugs. He was deeply interested in this man. There was something he liked about him. "What does it sell fur?" he asked, after a pause.