When, after being shaken awake and some stimulant hastily forced between his lips, the Markis started up muttering a plea to be left alone, and saw who was bending over him, he whispered, for his voice was hoarse and uncertain, “It’s you, Doc, is it? Well, I’d ruther you’n another! For it’s all up this time; it’s either go to the town farm to-night, or be a stiff, and I’m near that now. We thought mebbe we could pull through till the next shad run, Maje and me, but now the nets and all hev gone!” Then, sitting up and pulling himself together with an effort, “Would you—I wouldn’t ask it of any other man—would you house the Maje, Doc, until maybe he’d drop off comfortable and quiet, or I get round again? and once in a time jest say, quick like, ‘Maje, where’s the Markis?’ to keep me in mind?” This time the Markis made no effort to hide the tears that washed roadways down his grimy cheeks. “But there is no need of this,” father replied, as, clearing his throat and wiping his nose, he tried to look severe and judicial, (dear Dad! how well I know this particularly impossible and fleeting expression of yours)—“I got you the promise of work at Mrs. Pippin’s only last week, to do a few light errands and keep her in split kindlings for three square meals a day, and pay in money by the hour for tinkering and carpentering, and you only stayed one morning! Man alive! you are intelligent! why can’t you work? The day is over when hereabout men can live like wild-fowl!” “Doctor Russell,” said the Markis, speaking slowly and raising a lean forefinger solemnly, “did you ever try to keep Mis’s Pippin in kettlewood for three square meals a day, likewise her opinion o’ you thrown in for pepper, and talk o’ waiting hell fire for mustard, with only one door to the woodshed and her a-standin’ in it? Not but the meals was square enough, that was jest it,—they was too square, they wouldn’t swaller! Give me a man’s job and I’ll take a brace and try it for the Major here, but who takes one of us takes both, savvy? Beside, when Mis’s Pippin was Luella Green she liked to dance ter my fiddlin’, and now she don’t like ter think o’t and seein’ me reminds her!” Here father broke down and laughed, he confesses, and with the change of mood came the remembrance that the son of the rich Van Camps of the Bluffs, whose sporting possessions dot the country from Canada to Florida, needed a man to tend his boat house that lay further round the bay, and to take him occasionally to the ducking grounds at the crucial moment of wind and weather. Thus far, though several landsmen had attempted it, no one had kept the job long owing to its loneliness, and the fact that they lacked the outdoor knack, for the pay was liberal.