“Well, she’s a dum likely lookin’ woman, ef she _is_ a Richardson,” said Milton, with something like enthusiasm. “Wonder ef she wears one o’ them low-necked gaowns when she’s to hum, like th’ picters in th’ _Ledger_. They say they all dew, in New York.” “Haow sh’d I knaow!” Alvira sharply responded. “I got enough things to think of, ’thaout both’rin’ my head abaout city women’s dresses. ’N’ you ought to hev, tew. Ef you’n’ Leander’d pay more heed to yer work, ’n’ dew yer chores up ship-shape, ’n’ spen’ less time porin’ over them good-fer-nothin’ story-papers, th’ farm wouldn’t look so run-daown ’n’ slaouchy. Did yeh hear what Albert said this mornin’, when he looked ’raoun’? ‘I swan! ’ he said, ‘I b’lieve this is th’ seediest lookin’ place ’n all Northern New York.’ Nice thing fer him to hev to say, wa’n’t it!” “What d’ I keer what _he_ says? He ain’t th’ boss here, by a jug-full!” “’N’ more’s th’ pity, tew. He’d make yeh toe th’ mark!” “Yes, ’n’ Sabriny’d make it lively fer his wife, tew. Th’ ole fight ’baout th’ Fairchileses ’n’ th’ Richardsons wouldn’t be a succumstance to thet. Sissly’d thank her stars thet she was dead ’n’ buried aout o’ th’ way.” These two hired people, who discussed their employer and his family with that easy familiarity of Christian names to be found only in Russia and rural America, knew very well what portended to the house when the Richardson subject came up. Alvira Roberts had spent more than twenty years of her life in the thick of the gaseous strife between Fairchild and Richardson. She was a mere slip of a girl, barely thirteen, when she had first hired out at the homestead, and now, black-browed, sallow from much tea-drinking, and with a sharp, deep wrinkle vertically dividing her high forehead, she looked every year of her thirty-five. Compared with her, Milton Squires was a new comer on the farm, but still there were lean old cows over yonder in the barnyard, lazily waiting for the night-march to the pastures, that had been ravenous calves in their gruel-bucket stage when he came. What these two did not know about the Fairchild family was hardly worth the knowing. Something of what they knew, the reader ought here to be told. CHAPTER II.--THE STORY OF LEMUEL. Lemuel Fairchild, the bowed, gray-haired, lumpish man who at this time sat in the main living room within, feebly rocking himself by the huge wood-stove, and trying vaguely as he had been for thirty-six hours past, to realize that his wife lay in her final sleep in the adjoining chamber, had forty-odd years before been as likely a young farmer as Dearborn County knew. He was fine-looking and popular in those days, and old Seth Fairchild, dying unexpectedly, had left to this elder son his whole possessions--six hundred acres of dairy and hop land, free and clear, a residence much above the average farm-house of these parts, and a tidy sum of money in the bank.