During the day or two which followed his interview with Tappelmine, Father Baguss was consumed with conflicting emotions. He could not deny that his offer to help Tappelmine had taken an unpleasant load off of his own heart; but it was equally certain that the contemplation of the possible results of the arrangement gave him a sense of oppression, which differed from the first in quality, but of which the quantity was far too great to be endured with comfort. To find a way of getting out of the whole matter was a suggestion which came frequently to the heart of the old man, and was not as rigidly excluded as it would have been from that of the reader; but fortunately for the honesty of Father Baguss, his ingenuity was of the lowest order conceivable; so he did as thousands of his betters have done when unable, by any abandonment of self-respect, to avoid the inevitable: he submitted, and groaned frequently to the Lord. Sometimes these efforts before the Unseen increased the old man’s lugubriousness; at other times, a song came to his rescue, followed by a troop of its own kind; but so uncertain were his moods that Mrs. Baguss, who never before had occasion to suppose that there was a single nerve in her husband’s body, began to complain that she didn’t “believe in this thing of lookin’ out for other folks, if it makes you cranky with your own.” The old man’s trouble increased on the third day, for Tappelmine dropped in and hinted vaguely that it was not yet too late to plant winter wheat. The old man went into Tappelmine’s field with his own team, and plowed; he worked his horses longer hours than he ever did on his own ground; he lent an extra horse to work with Tappelmine’s own before a harrow; he himself sowed the wheat, casting now plentifully, as he thought of what Tappelmine might owe him by harvest-time, and now scantily, as he thought of what might be his own fate if the crop should be troubled with rust, or blight, or rain, or drought. And all the while, as he followed his horses, the old man kept uttering short petitions for Tappelmine and himself; and all the while his soul was full of unspoken prayers for heavy rains or sudden cold, so that the work might be stopped by the hand of Providence himself. But no such fortune befell the good old man: such an open fall had not been known since the settlement of Barton; even the Indian summer lasted so long that the poet of the Barton _Register_ found opportunity to publish, in three successive weekly numbers, “odes,” which could be read in the weather which suggested them. When a heavy rain at last put an end to field work, there were twenty-seven acres in wheat on the Tappelmine estate. Father Baguss ached in soul and body, but the wheat-field work was but the beginning of sorrow. The Tappelmine larder was bareness itself; there was not a porker in the Tappelmine pen; there was not even corn enough in the Tappelmine crib to feed