"See how hard it be's gettin' for grampa to get along, Jim," she said to her husband, who sat mending a binder-canvas at the granary door. "I never noticed it before, but that old lame Charley horse can keep right up to him now." Jim Nixon stuck his jack-knife into the step beside him, pushed a rivet through canvas and fastening-strap, and remarked, casually: "He ought to lay off now--too old to be chorin' around. Young Bill could do all the work he's doin', after he comes home from school, evenings." "He's not bin the same sence gramma died," Gracie Nixon observed, turning indoors again. "It ain't likely we'll have him with us long now, Jim." The old man, coming into the house a little haltingly that evening, stopped sharply as his granddaughter, with a discomposingly intent look, asked, "Tired to-night, grampa?" "Ey?" His mouth worked, and his eyes, the pupils standing aggressively and stonily in the center of the whites, abetted the protest of the indomitable old pioneer. "Tired nothin'. You young ones wants t'l maind yur own business, an' that'll--egh--kape yous busy. Where's me pipe, d'ye hear, ey? An' the 'bacca? Yagh, that's it." The old man's fingers crooked eagerly around the musty bowl. He lit, sucked, and puffed noisily, lowering himself on a bench and feeling for the window-sill with his elbow. "In my taime," he continued, presently, in an aggrieved tone, "young ones was whopped fur talkin' up t'l thur elders like that. Lave me be, now, an' go 'n' milk thame cows I just fetched. Poor beasts, their bags es that full--ey, that full. They're blattin' to be eased." With indulgent haste, the young couple, smiling sheepishly at each other like big children rebuked, picked up their strainer-pails and went away to the corral. The old man, his pipe-bowl glowing and blackening in time to his pulling at it, smoked on alone in the dusk. In the nibbling, iterative way of the old, he started a kind of reflection; but it was as if a harmattan had blown along the usual courses of his thought, drying up his little brooklet of recollection and withering the old aquatic star-flowers that grew along its banks. His mind, in its meandering among old images, groped, paused, fell pensive. His head sank lower between his shoulders, and the shoulders eased back against the wall behind his bench. When Jim Nixon and his wife, chasing each other merrily back and forth across the dewy path like the frolicsome young married couple they were, reached the door-yard, they found the old man fallen "mopy" in a way uncommon for him, and quite given over to a thoughtless, expressionless torpor and staring. "You'll be tired-like, grampa, eh?" Jim Nixon said, as he came over to the veteran and put a strong hand under Old Dalton's armpit. "Come on, then. I'll help you off to your bed."