When they arrived at the place that Mr. Fitch explained was his home, Edwin was more delighted than ever, for he had never pictured anything more beautiful. But when they drew near the house and he heard oaths and language still more vile than he had ever heard from his mother's tongue, he wondered if he heard aright. Even during her most terrible tantrums he had never heard such words, and when through the open kitchen-door he saw Mrs. Fitch with a rolling-pin in one hand and a pie-pan in the other and with her face turned toward the sky, blaspheming the great God of the universe for permitting a certain crop to fail, he felt faint and sick. Again and again the wicked woman blasphemed that holy name because of the failure caused by drought, and threatened, on account of the failure, to enter other fields and with a burning torch to set fire to them all. Then as curse after curse upon other things rang from her lips, she continued beating the air with rolling-pin and pan until it was dangerous to be inside the room. Edwin remained very close to the door, and the girl whom Mr. Fitch had mentioned as being his wife's helper, he saw spring to one side just in time to escape being struck by a huge piece of dough that was thrown by the wicked woman at her head. How long the unearthly scene had been going on or would have continued is hard to say, but from exhaustion Mrs. Fitch sank heavily upon the floor and for some time was in an unconscious condition. In answer to Edwin's worried expression Mr. Fitch remarked, "Oh, that's nothing! She'll be all right after a while," and together they went out to the barn. Edwin asked no questions, but he wondered if such things were right and had to be. In this new place he soon discovered that he must bear, in some ways, even greater cruelties than had been forced upon him in his mother's home, for in rainy weather or during the hardest storms as much was expected of him as when the sun was shining. Many times he was forced to work all day long without a dry thread of clothing upon his body and often without sufficient food. For all this he never complained, but he wondered why it was impossible to please some people, when he was always satisfied with so little. The greater part of the Fitch property that was used for pasturing purposes was low and swampy and had long been the haunt of many poisonous snakes. One portion of the land that was higher than the rest, Mr. Fitch had decided to have prepared for spring plowing, and Edwin's work was to gather the brush and the stones into piles that they might be burned or hauled away. He was also instructed to drive the cows from those parts of the pasture in which the snakes were the most numerous. With nothing to protect his bare feet and with no understanding of the danger of snakebites, he was often tramping in places where the reptiles were gliding past him in many directions, but upon none of these occasions was he ever bitten.