|BEFORE the end of his first week's work Paul had reason to believe that Hoag was highly pleased with his executive ability. Paul had a good saddle-horse at his disposal, and he made daily visits to the various properties of his employer. He hired hands at his own discretion, and had a new plan of placing them on their honor as to the work that was to be done in his absence. Hoag was surprised. He had found it difficult to secure sufficient men, while under Paul's management the places were always filled. There was a clockwork regularity in it all. From his window every morning at sunrise Hoag could see men diligently at work in his fields, and at the tannery and mill. There was a fresh, buoyant activity in it all. The young man had replaced old, worn-out tools and implements with new ones, in which the workers took pride. Paul's room looked as much like an office as a bedchamber. On his table Hoag discovered a most orderly set of accounts; on the walls hung charts, time-cards, and maps of the woodlands, with careful estimates of the cost of felling trees and the best disposition of the bark and timber. There was little doubt that Paul was infusing the spirit of the West into the slower habits of the South, and Hoag chuckled inwardly, finding it difficult to keep from openly expressing his enthusiasm. Paul convinced him, in a moment's talk, that the steam-engine and machinery at the cotton-gin were worn out, and that the whole should be renewed. Hoag saw, too, that the young man was right when he called attention to the careless manner in which the cotton lands had been fertilized. The negroes had used no judgment in placing the guano, having often put it on soil that did not need it--soil which could better be enriched by the till now unused loam of the marshes and the decayed matter of the forests. “Go ahead with yore rat-killin',” Hoag was fond of saying. “You've got the right idea. I'm not such a old dog that I can't learn new tricks. Them fellows out West know a good many twists and turns that we ain't onto, an' I'm willin' to back you up with the cash on anything you propose.” His niece was with him on the lawn one morning as he was opening his mail. “Just look at that letter,” he said, with a low, pleased laugh, as he offered it for inspection. “I'm in a cool thousand dollars on this one deal. My scrub of a white-trash manager told me last week that the man in Atlanta who has been handlin' my leather was buncoin' me good an' strong. I didn't think he knowed what he was talkin' about then, but it seems he'd been readin' market reports an' freight rates, an' now I know he was right. He asked me to write to Nashville for prices. I did, an' here is an offer that is away ahead of any my Atlanta agent ever got, an' I save his commission to boot. Who'd 'a' thought, Eth', that such a puny no-account skunk as Ralph Rundel could be the daddy o' sech an up-to-date chap as Paul?”