I rose and went to the barn for a load of manure. The great pile which had been there when I bought the place was already used up, but I secured enough litter with a rake to cover the beds and brought it back. By then the hour was nearly twelve, and consequently too late to spade it under, so I went into the house to see if the painters were getting the colour right. They were, or as nearly right as it seems to be humanly possible for house painters to do, and I plodded up the road to dinner. As I passed my potato field, I saw rows of green shoots above the ground, and out under my lone pine I saw a figure, sitting in the shadow on the stone wall. I climbed through the brambles over the wall, and walked down the aisles of potatoes toward her. "It is time for dinner," I said meekly. She looked up. "Is it? I have been listening to the old pine talk." "What was he saying?" I asked. "Things you wouldn't understand," said she. "About words in 'hy'?" She shook her head. "Not at all; nothing quite so stupid--but nearly as saddening." She rose to her feet, and her eyes looked into mine, enigmatically wistful. "I missed you after you went away from Twin Fires," said I suddenly. "I don't know whether I got the sundial beds right or not. Won't you please come back to tell me? Or am I stupid again, and mustn't you advise me about that?" Her eyes twinkled a little. "You are still very stupid," she said, "but perhaps I will consent to give my invaluable advice on this important subject." "Good!" I cried. "And we'll build some more trellis if your hands are better." "My hands are all right," she said, with the faintest emphasis on the noun, which made a variety of perplexing interpretations possible and kept me silent as I helped her over the wall into Bert's great cauliflower field, and we tramped through the soft soil toward the house. Chapter IX WE SEAT THOREAU IN THE CHIMNEY NOOK, AND I WRITE A SONNET After dinner she approved the sundial beds with a mock-judicial gravity, and then she went at the trellis, working with a kind of impersonal nervous intensity that troubled me, I didn't quite know why. She said, with a brief laugh, it was because she had suggested the structure, and she could never rest till any job she had undertaken was completed. "You live too hard," said I. "That's the trouble with most of us nowadays. We are over-civilized. We don't know how to take things easy, because we have the vague idea of so many other things to be done always crowding across the threshold of our consciousness." "Perhaps," she answered. "The 'J' words, for instance, if they get 'I' done before my return. Thank heaven, 'J' hasn't contributed so many words to science as 'Hy'!" "Forget the dictionary!" I cried. "You are going to stay here a long time--till these roses bloom, or at any rate till the sundial beds have come to flower. Besides, there'll be a lot of things about my house where your advice cannot be spared."