“Yes, that’s a fac’!” cried Mrs. Sanders, with an unwonted animation. The singular event in her dull experience had roused a not unpleasurable excitement, and she had regarded the absorption of the two at the anvil with a reluctant sense of being shut out from continued participation, and having reached a finality. The allusion to the past revived her capacity for extracting interest from the circumstance. “What d’ ye think, Clem? This hyar man ’lows ez one night, not so long ago, he started over the mountings, ter kem down hyar ter git his pickaxe mended,—it war bruk,—an’ he los’ his way, an’ miscalc’lated his time somehows, an’ ’twar middlin’ late ’fore he got hyar. An’ he kem ter the house, an’ knocked an’ knocked, an’ never rousted up nobody. So—ha, ha!” the detail seemed to commend itself to Mrs. Sanders’s sense of humor, as she sat bolt upright on the keg of nails and recounted; “so ez he war goin’ back he passed by hyar, an’ a suddint thought streck him: he jes’ kindled up the fire,—thar war a few coals lef alive,—an’ mended his tool hisse’f. He say he jes’ wondered what we-uns would hev said ef we hed woke, an’ seen the light an’ hearn the hammer! I’d hev ’lowed ’twar Satan, or a harnt, one.” She folded her arms, and with a deft motion of her head shook her sun-bonnet a little further back, that she might turn her smile upon the stranger; not so pleasing a demonstration as its good-nature might have desired to make it, for she had lost several of her front teeth, and those that were left were conspicuous in their isolation. It showed Teck Jepson that the stranger had succeeded in winning her good opinion; and even Clem, more thoroughly informed though he was, lifted his eyebrows and looked significantly at his coadjutor, evidently accepting this candid and obvious explanation of the mystery. Jepson began to see that he need expect nothing but hindrance from both mother and son, and that the least plausible wiles might prove efficacious to hoodwink these simple souls. He still stood in the doorway, but leaning against its frame, his arms folded across his broad chest, his hat far back on his head; and although he often gazed up speculatively at the moon, whose light was full in his face, he saw that the stranger still held his every movement under notice, and gave him the attention of a speculative glance after every phrase, as if seeking to judge how it impressed him. The pause was broken only by a cricket, in some sheltered nook among the eaves, and a wheezing coughing that Silas presently set up, as if some of the lies he had told were choking him, as he crouched on the hub of the broken wheel. But when Mrs. Sanders remarked, that she would give him some hoarhound when she got him to the house, he contrived to swallow them all, and relapsed into wide-eyed silence. “That was the time I broke the tongs. I was here once besides,” said the stranger, who seemed to feel more and more at ease.