"And who may this Scotch lassie be?" I asked with a smile, and busy, now, unsaddling. "I mean the new servant to old Douw Fonda." "I have not noticed her." "You have not seen the Caughnawaga girl?" "No. I remain incurious concerning servants," said I, drily. "Is it so!" he laughed. "Well, then,--for all that they have a right to gold binding on their hats,--the gay youth of Johnstown, yes, and of Schenectady, too, have not remained indifferent to the Scotch girl of Douw Fonda, Penelope Grant!" I shrugged and lifted my saddle. "Every man to his taste," said I. "Some eat woodchucks, some porcupines, and others the tail of a beaver. Venison smacks sweeter to me." Nick laughed again. "When she reads the old man to sleep and takes her knitting to the porch, you should see the ring of gallants every afternoon a-courting her!--and their horses tied to every tree around the house as at a quilting! "But there's no quilting frolic; no supper; no dance;--nothing more than a yellow-haired slip of a wench busy knitting there in the sun, and looking at none o' them but intent on her needles and with that faint smile she wears----" "Go court her," said I, laughing; and led my mare into her warm stall. "You'll court her yourself, one day!" he shouted after me, as he gathered bridle. "And if you do, God help you, John Drogue, for they say she's a born disturber of quiet men's minds, and mistress of a very mischievous and deadly art!" "What art?" I laughed. "The art o' love!" he bawled as he rode off, slapping his thighs and setting the moonlit woods all a-ringing with his laughter. CHAPTER VII BEFORE THE STORM Johnny Silver had ridden my mare to Varick's to be shod, the evening previous, and was to remain the night and return by noon to Fonda's Bush. It was the first sunny May day of the year, murmurous with bees, and a sweet, warm smell from woods and cleared lands. Already bluebirds were drifting from stump to stump, and robins, which had arrived in April before the snow melted, chirped in the furrows of last autumn's plowing. Also were flying those frail little grass-green moths, earliest harbingers of vernal weather, so that observing folk, versed in the pretty signals which nature displays to acquaint us of her designs, might safely prophesy soft skies. I was standing in my glebe just after sunrise, gazing across my great cleared field--I had but one then, all else being woods--and I was thinking about my crops, how that here should be sown buckwheat to break and mellow last year's sod; and here I should plant corn and Indian squashes, and yonder, God willing, potatoes and beans.