To the young journalist this aspect was strange and curious. The farm had put on a new guise to his eyes. It was as if some mighty hand and brush had painted it all over with bright colors. It was not only that the house had been restored and refurnished, that new spacious buildings replaced the ancient barns, that the fences had been rebuilt, the farm yard cleaned up and sodded, the old well-curb and reach removed--the very grass seemed greener, the bending of the boughs more graceful, the charm of sky and foliage and verdure far more apparent. The cattle were plumper and cleaner; there were carriage horses now, with bright harness and sweeping tails, and a costly black mare for the saddle, fleet as the wind: the food on the table was more uniformly toothsome, and there were now the broad silver-plated forks to which Seth had somewhat laboriously become accustomed in his Tecumseh boardinghouse. He admired all these changes, in a way, but somehow he could not feel at home among them. They were attractive, but they were alien to the memories which, in his crowded, bricked-up city solitude, had grown dear to him. There were droll changes among the hired people. For one thing, they no longer all ate at the table with the family. An exception was made in favor of Milton Squires, who had burst through the overalls chrysalis of hired-manhood, and had become a sort of superintendent. He had not learned to eat with a fork, and he still talked loudly and with boisterous familiarity at the table, reaching for whatever he wanted, and calling the proprietor “Albert,” and his aunt “Sabriny.” He did not bear his social and industrial promotion meekly. He bullied the inferior hired men--Leander had a colleague now, a rough, tow-headed, burly young fellow named Dana Pills-bury--and snubbed loftily the menials of the kitchen. This former haunt scarcely knew him more, and his rare conversations with Alvira were all distinctly framed in condescension. This was only to be expected, for Milton wore a black suit of store-clothes every day, with a gold-plated watch chain and a necktie, and met the farmers round about on terms of practical equality. He was reputed to be a careful and capable manager; his wrath was feared at the cheese-factory; his judgment was respected at the corners’ store. Naturally, such a man would feel himself above kitchen associations. Of course this defection evoked deep wrath in Alvira’s part of the house, some overflowings of which came to Seth’s notice before he had been a day at the farm. Alvira was not specially changed to the young man’s eyes--indeed her sallow, bilious visage, dark snapping eyes and furrowed forehead seemed the most familiar things about the homestead, and her acidulous tones struck a truer note in his chords of memory than did any other sound.