The quarrel between the Buttses and the Graysons dated back to their first settlement in Illinois. Butts had regularly cut wild hay on the low-lying meadow between the two farms. Fond of getting something for nothing, he gave out among his neighbors that this forty acres was his own, but he put off entering it at the Land Office. When Tom Grayson's father entered his farm he found this piece blank and paid for it. From that time Butts had been his enemy, for there was no adjunct to a farm in the timber so highly prized as a bit of meadow. When once near neighbors in the country have quarreled their proximity is usually a guarantee that they will never be reconciled;--there are so many occasions of offense between people who must always be eating off the same plate. It was universally known that "the Buttses and the Graysons couldn't hitch." Where two of their fields joined without an intervening road they had not been able even to build a line fence together; but each man laid up a rail fence on the very edge of his own land, and the salient angles of the two hostile fences stood so near together that a half-grown pig could not have passed between. This is what is called, in the phrase of the country, a "devil's lane," because it is a monument of bad neighborhood. When Mason reached the school-house that morning Angeline Butts had her books and those of her younger brother and two younger sisters gathered in a heap, and the rest of the scholars were standing about her, while she did her best to propagate the family antagonism to the master. The jealousy of Lysander Butts's family had been much inflamed by Barbara's swift success in study. Angeline had never been able to get beyond the simple rules of arithmetic; her feeble bark had quite gone ashore on the sandy reaches of long division. The Buttses were therefore not pleased to have Barbara arrive at the great goal of the Rule of Three, and even become the marvel of the neighborhood by passing into the mysterious realm of algebraic symbols. For Angeline's part she "couldn't see no kind-uv good, noways you could fix it, in cipherin' with such saw-bucks." Figgers was good enough for common folks, she said, and all this gimcrack work with x's and y's was only just a trick to ketch the master. For her part she wouldn' fool away time settin' her cap for sech as him, not if he was the only man in the world.