“As soon as he’s equal to it, Aunt Sabrina, I’ll get father to go over his affairs with me, and I’ll try and straighten them out a trifle. I dare say we can find some way out of the muddle.” “But yeh won’t take up the thing yerself? Yeh won’t dew what I wanted yeh tew?” The lawyer smiled, and said: “What really? Come here and be a farmer?” Miss Sabrina had risen, too, and came toward her nephew. “No” she said, “not a farmer. Be a country gentleman, ’n’--’n’--a Congressman!” Albert smiled again, and left the room. He smiled to himself going down the stairs, and narrowly escaped forgetting to change his expression of countenance when he entered the living room, where were sitting people who had not entirely forgotten the fact that it was a house of mourning. For Albert had a highly interesting idea in his mind, both interesting and diverting. Curiously enough, he had begun developing it from the moment when his aunt first disclosed her ambition for him. At the last moment, in a blind way she had suggested the first political office that entered her mind as an added bribe. She could not know that her astute nephew had, from the first suggestion of her plan, been trying to remember whether it was Jay and Adams Counties, or Jay and Morgan, that were associated with Dearborn in the Congressional district; or that, when she finally in despair said “Be a country gentleman and a Congressman,” his brain had already turned over a dozen projects in as many seconds, every one Congressional. CHAPTER VII.--THE THREE BROTHERS. After the early supper of stale bread, saltless butter, dark dried apple sauce, and chippy cake had been disposed of, Lemuel returned to his rocking chair by the stove, Aunt Sabrina and Isabel took seats, each at a window, and read by the fading light, and Albert put on his hat, lighted a cigar, and went out. His brother John stood smoking a pipe in the yard, leaning against the high well-curb, his hands deep in his pantaloons pocket, and his feet planted far to the front and wide apart. Seth was coming from the barns toward the well, with a bucket in his hand. Albert walked across to the curb, and the three brothers were alone together for the first time in years. “It does one good to be out of doors such an evening as this,” said Albert. “It seems to me it would be better if father would get out in the open air more, instead of sitting cooped up over that stove all the while.” “When a man’s been out in the open air, rain or shine, snow or blow, for fifty years, he ought to have earned the right to stay inside, if he wants to. That’s about the only reward there is at the end of a farmer’s life,” answered Seth, turning the calfbucket upside down beside John, and sitting on it. Seth had his old clothes on once more, and perhaps there was some consciousness of the contrast between his apparel and that of his black-clad brethren in the truculent tone of his reply.