Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such back-aching work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill into the trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the hay and grain were in. But on the other hand, I knew that the present idleness meant—as everything else now seemed to mean—that the Beech farm was going to the dogs. “No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don't need drainin' any more. It's dry as a powder-horn now.” “Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it's Abner that can't stand much more drainin',” he said. “They say he's looking all round for a mortgage, and can't raise one.” “No such thing!” I replied. “His health's poorly this summer, that's all. And Jeff—he dont seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.” My companion laughed outright. “Mustn't call him Jeff any more,” he remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was going to have people call him Tom after this. He can't stand answerin' to the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says. “I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment, indignantly. The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad lots a good deal on names. He's down-right mortified that I don't get up and kill people because my name's Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to me, ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, and instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies of righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels and cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you'd been named Pete or Steve or William Henry.' That's what he gives me pretty nearly every day.” I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old Abolitionist cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his son. We understood that these two appellations had alternated among his ancestors as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings and Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the blue veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But that, of course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when I still went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a novel impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn. His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered. “Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter—“last time he went for me because I wasn't measurin' up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be like, I up an' said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass houses mustn't heave rocks. If I'm Benaiah, you're Jehoiada. Well, it says in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants? Not a bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an' then an odd pork barrel.’” “What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion's merriment abated.