Whenever you hear a man laughing at pride of ancestry, you may be sure that his ancestors were no better than my fathers were. But if he is always talking about his ancestry, depend upon it, he has something back of him as good as the Durbans, and his forbears looked down on farmers. We worked until the whistles at Egerton blew for noon, and I had by that time devastated quite a patch of grass. Windham had been busy in other places all the morning, and when he came to look at what I had done he made no reference to the thrift of the Germans. He looked at the regular patches of spared blades that were holding their heads high amidst the blades that had fallen so bravely, and said, “How would you like to drive the rake this afternoon?” I blushed and said that I believed that would be a change of work. I did not laugh at the somewhat amateur raking of Ethel and Cherry. Hay-making is an art, and beginners learn better by encouragement than by ridicule. We had brought our lunch, and we picnicked under the spreading branches of an oak, and found that we were feeling “pretty good.” And we had six red arms to our credit—four of them pretty. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXII “DING DONG BELL.” THE week passed so quickly, with our hay-making and our getting over our hay-making and our pleasant walks—we did not attempt to drive out again behind “th’ ould scut”,—and the attractive meals that Minerva cooked and the pleasant music that Cherry found within the piano, that when Friday came, and Cherry asked me if I had found a team to carry her down, Ethel said, “It’s all nonsense, your thinking of going back. Philip, she says that she hasn’t made any plans at all, beyond thinking of going to Bar Harbor in September to visit her aunt.” “Well, then, Cherry, it will be downright unkind in you to ask me to hunt up a team yet awhile. Just stay on until the haying season is over, and we can go down behind a real horse.” “Well, of course I’m having a perfectly delicious time,” said Cherry, putting her arms around Ethel’s shoulders affectionately, “and I’d much rather stay than go, but it seems like—” “It doesn’t seem like anything at all,” said Ethel, “except that we want you to stay. And, besides, we want you to meet Ellery Sibthorp.” “Ellery Sibthorp,” said Cherry with a laugh. “Is that his real name?” “That’s his real name, the one he writes under, and Philip asked me to ask him up. He’s all alone in the world and is struggling to make a name for himself.”