Still she stared at the thing curiously. "Gee! It was hot getting them calves out to-day, and old Safety First moaning about all over the place how he's being stuck with 'em, till more than once I come near forgetting I was a lady--and, oh, yes"--she brightened--"I was going to tell you. After it was all over, Wilbur, the gallant young tone poet, comes gushing up to me and says, 'Now, aunty, always when you are in town you must drop round and break bread with us.' Aunty, mind you, right off the reel. 'Well,' I says, 'if I drop round to break any bread your wife bakes I'll be sure to bring a hammer.' I couldn't help it. He'll make a home for the girl all right, but he does something sinful to my nerves every time he opens his face. And then coming back here, where I looked for God's peace and quiet, and being made to hear that darned song every time I turned round! "I give orders plain enough, but say, it's like a brush fire--you never know when you got it stamped out." From the kitchen came the sound of a dropped armful of stove wood. Hard upon this, the unctuous whining tenor of Jimmie Time: Oh-h-h mem-o-reez thu-hat blu-hess and bu-hurn! "You, Jimmie Time!" It is a voice meant for Greek tragedy and a theatre open to the heavens. I could feel the terror of the aged vassal. "Yes, ma'am!" The tone crawled abasingly. "I forgot myself." I was glad, and I dare say he had the wit to be, that he had not to face the menace of her glare. III THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts. As a trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable. But standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear addressed as Jimmie Time. He alone piqued as well as interested. There was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me. I have said he is a man; but wait! The years have had him, have scoured and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been misused for years threescore. Time has basely done all but age him. So much for the wastrel as Nature has left him. But Art has furthered the piquant values of him as a spectacle.