Emory was indeed clumsy, for he had stretched his hand downward to offer a morsel to a friend of his under the table--he was on terms of exceeding amity with the four-footed members of the house hold--and in his absorption not withdrawing it as swiftly as one accustomed to canine manners should do, he had his frosted finger well mumbled before he could, as it were, repossess himself of it. "I wonder what they charge fur iron over yander at the settlemint, Em'ry?" observed Sim Roxby presently. "Dun'no', sir," responded Emory, glumly, his sullen black eyes full of smouldering fire--"hevin' no call ter know, ez I ain't no blacksmith." "I war jes' wonderin' ef tenpenny nails didn't cost toler'ble high ez reg'lar feed," observed Roxby, gravely. But his mother laughed out with a gleeful cracked treble, always a ready sequence of her son's rustic sallies. "He got ye that time, Em'ry," she cried. A forced smile crossed Emory's face. He tossed back his tangled dark hair with a gasp that was like the snort of an unruly horse submitting to the inevitable, but with restive projects in his brain. "I let the dog hyar ketch my finger whilst feedin' him," he said. His plausible excuse for the tenpenny expression was complete; but he added, his darker mood recurring instantly, "An', Mis' Roxby, I hev put a stop ter them ez hev tuk ter callin' me Em'ly, I hev." The old woman looked up, her small wrinkled mouth round and amazed. "_I_ never called ye Emily," she declared. Swift repentance seized him. "Naw, 'm," he said, with hurried propitiation. "I 'lowed ye did." "I didn't," said the old woman. "But ef I war ter find it toothsome ter call ye 'Emily,' I dun'no' how ye air goin' ter pervent it. Ye can't go gunnin' fur me, like ye done fur the men at the mill, fur callin' ye 'Emily.'" "Law, Mis' Roxby!" he could only exclaim, in his horror and contrition at this picture he had thus conjured up. "Ye air welcome ter call me ennything ye air a mind ter," he protested. And then he gasped once more. The eyes of the guest, contemptuous, amused, seeing through him, were fixed upon him. And he himself had furnished the lily-handed stranger with the information that he had been stigmatized "Em'ly" in the banter of his associates, until he had taken up arms, as it were, to repress this derision. "It takes powerful little ter put ye down, Em'ry," said Roxby, with rallying laughter. "Mam hev sent ye skedaddlin' in no time at all. I don't b'lieve the Lord made woman out'n the man's rib. He made her out'n the man's backbone; fur the man ain't hed none ter speak of sence."