“I feel to enjoy it, anything that I can do my own way so,” responded Peggy. “I like to do my part. Ain’t that old Mis’ Fales comin’ up the road? It sounds like her step.” The others looked, but they were not farsighted, and for a moment Peggy had the advantage. Mrs. Fales was not a favorite. “I hope she ain’t comin’ here to put up this spring. I guess she won’t now, it’s gettin’ so late,” said Betsey Lane. “She likes to go rovin’ soon as the roads is settled.” “’Tis Mis’ Fales!” said Peggy Bond, listening with solemn anxiety. “There, do let’s pray her by!” “I guess she’s headin’ for her cousin’s folks up Beech Hill way,” said Betsey presently. “If she’d left her daughter’s this mornin’, she’d have got just about as far as this. I kind o’ wish she had stepped in just to pass the time o’ day, long’s she wa’n’t going to make no stop.” There was a silence as to further speech in the shed chamber; and even the calves were quiet in the barnyard. The men had all gone away to the field where corn-planting was going on. The beans clicked steadily into the wooden measure at the pickers’ feet. Betsey Lane began to sing a hymn, and the others joined in as best they might, like autumnal crickets; their voices were sharp and cracked, with now and then a few low notes of plaintive tone. Betsey herself could sing pretty well, but the others could only make a kind of accompaniment. Their voices ceased altogether at the higher notes. “Oh my! I wish I had the means to go to the Centennial,” mourned Betsey Lane, stopping so suddenly that the others had to go on croaking and shrilling without her for a moment before they could stop. “It seems to me as if I can’t die happy ‘less I do,” she added; “I ain’t never seen nothin’ of the world, an’ here I be.”