like wine.” Alex. laughed and patted the big fellow, who took kindly to him, and if he did not answer at once to Sherry, he soon learned the whistle with which his new master called him. Alex. would like to have taken the cat, but as that was impracticable he left it for Lee, with many injunctions that it should be well cared for, and with his dog started for home, turning aside from the main route to see the farm, about which he had a great deal of curiosity. At the station, which was a mile from the house, he took the only available conveyance, a box sleigh, drawn by a spavined horse and driven by a loquacious man, who informed him that his name was Bowles—“a carpenter by trade in the summer and a jack-at-all-trades in the winter, when folks didn’t have much tinkerin’ of houses to do.” “Know the Marsh place? You bet,” he said, slapping the reins on Spavin’s back with an injunction to “ca-dap.” “I used to tinker there by odd spells before the old gent went away, and he left me to look after things,—kind of an agent. Nice man? Wall, I guess he was ’bout as good as they make ’em; never heard a breath against him. Little queer sometimes, and talked to himself a good deal; but, land sakes, there was nobody else to talk to half the time, he lived alone so much. It beats all how curis some folks is about an old house,—real old like this one which must have heard the thunder of the Revolution, if it had thundered this way. The grandees who come to the mountains in the summer drive up here, rafts of ’em, and, oh, my suz, what a time the women make over the old place, and how they want to buy things if they was for sale. Why, I could have sold an old chest in the garret a dozen times. It’s full of clothes, women’s clothes, and when I told ’em that they was crazy to see ’em. But I said no;—they wasn’t mine to sell, nor to show. I’ve been a faithful steward, I have. And you are goin’ to take the place? Well, I’m glad to have somebody see to it besides me. It’s a sin the way things has gone on sence he quit rentin’ it square. Old mother Chase and her brood squatted on it one winter. I let ’em in, to be sure, at a nominal rent, but, land sakes, I never got a cent, and they split up the back room floor for wood and half the suller stairs, and then decamped in the night. Farmer Jones kept his cows there in the summer, and somebody else their horses,—in the pasture, I mean,—and I can’t collect a cent. ’Twas the finest farm in these parts once, and might be again with a little care. Going to farm it yourself?” Bowles glanced sidewise at the young man beside him, wrapped in a fur-lined coat, and thought how unlike he looked to a farmer. “I don’t know,” Alex. said. “Is the house greatly out of repair?”