Morton was glad, indeed, to have her spin. He was, in his present perplexed state, willing to avoid all conversation except such broken talk as might be carried on while Patty wound the spun yarn upon the spindle, or adjusted a new roll of wool. Nothing shows off the grace of the female figure as did the old spinning-wheel. Patty's perfect form was disfigured by no stays, or pads, or paniers--her swift tread backwards with her up-raised left hand, her movement of the wheel with the right, all kept her agile figure in lithe action. If plastic art were not an impossibility to us Americans, our stone-cutters might long since have ceased, like school-boys, to send us back from Rome imitation Venuses, and counterfeit Hebes, and lank Lincolns aping Roman senators, and stagey Washingtons on stage-horses;--they would by this time have found out that in our primitive life there are subjects enough, and that in mythology and heroics we must ever be dead copyists. But I do not believe Morton was thinking of art at all, as he sat there in the October evening sun and watched the little feet, yet full of unexhausted energy after traveling to and fro all day. He did not know, or care, that Patty, with her head thrown back and her left arm half outstretched to guide her thread, was a glorious subject for a statue. He had never seen marble, and had never heard of statues except in the talk of the old schoolmaster. How should her think to call her statuesque? Or how should he know that the wide old log-kitchen, with its loom in one corner, its vast fireplace, wherein sit the two huge, black andirons, and wherein swings an iron crane on which hang pot-hooks with iron pots depending--the old kitchen, with its bark-covered joists high overhead, from which are festooned strings of drying pumpkins--how should Morton Goodwin know that this wide old kitchen, with its rare centre-piece of a fine-featured, fresh-hearted young girl straining every nerve to spin two dozen cuts of yarn in a day, would make a _genre_ piece, the subject of which would be good enough for one of the old Dutch masters? He could not know all this, but he did know, as he watched the feet treading swiftly and rhythmically back and forth, and as he saw the fine face, ruddy with the vigorous exercise, looking at him over the top of a whirling wheel whose spokes were invisible--he did know that Patty Lumsden was a little higher than angels, and he shuddered when he remembered that to-morrow, and indefinitely afterward, he might be shut out from her father's house. It was while he sat thus and listened to Patty's broken patches of sprightly talk and the monotonous symphony of her wheel, that Captain Lumsden came into the yard, snapping his rawhide whip against his boots, and walking, in his eager, jerky fashion, around to the kitchen door.