“Yes; but you’d better take advice now for once in your life, and be very careful of your language and your behavior when you are in the presence of those same country bumpkins. That Don is pretty broad-shouldered, and I notice he’s got a grip like a young blacksmith. I found that out when I shook hands with him. If you are as tyrannical and overbearing with him as you are with me sometimes, you may get yourself into business.” Just then the ringing of a bell in the hall brought Clarence to his feet. “What’s that for, I wonder?” he exclaimed. “Dinner, most likely.” “Dinner at twelve!” said Clarence, glancing at his watch. “And supper at six and bed at half-past eight, I suppose!” “Probably; and what will trouble you still more, breakfast at six every morning,” said Marshall. “You can’t lie in bed here till ten or eleven o’clock and then have breakfast sent up to you.” Clarence said something more about “country bumpkins,” repeated the resolution he had so suddenly formed that his sojourn under his uncle’s roof should be a very short one, and then made all haste to get ready for dinner. CHAPTER VIII. DAN MAKES A DISCOVERY. The next morning, long before the sun showed himself above the tree-tops, the Evans family were all astir. They always rose at an early hour, and it was probably more from the force of habit than for any other reason, for, with the exception of Mrs. Evans, none of them did any work until after they had eaten breakfast. Even the chores were left until the male members of the family had broken their fast, for Godfrey declared that it was not healthy, in that climate, to breathe too much of the early morning air, it was so laden with miasma and the seeds of fever and ague; but he did not seem to think it at all injurious if inhaled through the fumes of tobacco smoke, and while seated on the bench beside the cabin door. That bench served Godfrey in lieu of an easy-chair. When he was not hunting in the woods or loafing at the landing, he was always to be found there, smoking and thinking. On the morning of this particular day, Godfrey arose from his “shake down” with the air of a lord, and astonished two members of his family and alarmed another, by giving them all a hearty greeting. When he had dressed himself he filled his pipe, and walking out of the door with a slow and dignified step, stood with his hands on his hips, looking about him as if he were monarch of all he surveyed. Mrs. Evans said to herself that that was the way he used to act in the good old days; while Dan communed thus with himself: “If me an’ pop had been out a diggin’ fur that thar bar’l last night, an’ had done found it, I should know that that was what ails him this mornin’; but seein’ we didn’t dig fur the bar’l, I don’t know what’s the matter of him. He don’t walk with that big leg, an’ sling on all them extry frills, fur nothin’, an’ I’m afeared he’s smelled out somethin’. If he has----”