“I know you all have a good deal of fun behind my back about the way I’ve shifted over,” he said, quietly. “I know that it makes you laugh to hear me go ’round preachin’ about gittin’ a little something out of life as you go along. I don’t care if you do laugh. Laugh! The more ye laugh, the less you’ll growl. But me and my wife has woke up, and we don’t care who knows it, and if some of the rest of you would wake up, too, you’d find that the only thing the sun shines for ain’t to raise crops and make freckles.” “P’raps if all of us could git holt of a ready-made, grown-up daughter, as good as the one you’ve got, we might improve some,” said Buck, with a wink at his associates in “hector.” “P’raps you could,” Dunham answered, simply and earnestly. “Well, it makes a pretty good berth for a poor girl, ’Caje,” said a man behind the stove. “Most anyone would like to be adopted into a fam’ly like yours.” “It ain’t that way, neighbours,” Dunham said softly, his face in the direction of the music. “When we adopted ’Liza Haskell we was gettin’ the best end of the bargain, if ye want to put it on that kind of a basis. We was both all corners before--sharp corners at that. I ain’t backward about ownin’ up--we f’it, me and Esther, like fury, and we didn’t know what was the matter with us. But somehow there don’t seem to be any corners in our house now. Them that ain’t filled with new chairs and pictur’s is all full o’ sunshine. There ain’t a room in the house that looks like it used to--with the furniture standin’ round jest as though it had been used at a funeral last and was where the undertaker arranged it. We didn’t know what the matter was, I say--me and Esther didn’t. We don’t know jest how it’s come about nov. But we do know that we’ve adopted something besides a poor little girl--we’ve adopted sunshine and sweetness and comfort and new notions about livin’ and lovin’ and havin’.” He stood up and piled his parcels upon his arm. “That’s the way it is to our house nowadays, neighbours. I used to like to set here the whole ev’nin’ in the store before--but now--well, when I git to thinkin’ about how home is, why, it takes more than them pretty tunes to hold me here. There’s music to our house that’s better than all the brass bands in the world.” He went out and they heard the jingle of his sleigh-bells threading through the mellow notes of the cornet. “He was allus sort of a soft old fool when you got under his shell,” scoffed Uncle Buck, grinding his cane against the rusty stove. “What I can’t understand is how Esther ever come ’round as she did. I allus thought she was harder’n nails.” “Oh, it took Squire Phin to warm her ear-wax,” said Amazeen. “And when you know how to handle a woman like that, why, you’ve got her--that’s all. I cal’late there ain’t a man in the county that understands human natur’ better’n Squire Phin does. He can handle ’em all right when he makes up his mind to.”