“You don’t happen to want milk?” I put it to Miss Janie. “Susie seems to be good for about five gallons a day. I’m afraid if we drink it all ourselves we’ll get too fat.” “At twopence halfpenny a quart, delivered at the house, as much as you like,” replied Miss Janie. I made a note of that also. “Happen to know a useful boy?” I asked Miss Janie. “What about young Hopkins,” suggested her father. “The only male thing on this farm—with the exception of yourself, of course, father dear—that has got any sense,” said Miss Janie. “He can’t have Hopkins.” “The only fault I have to find with Hopkins,” said St. Leonard, “is that he talks too much.” “Personally,” I said, “I should prefer a country lad. I have come down here to be in the country. With Hopkins around, I don’t somehow feel it is the country. I might imagine it a garden city: that is as near as Hopkins would allow me to get. I should like myself something more suggestive of rural simplicity.” “I think I know the sort of thing you mean,” smiled Miss Janie. “Are you fairly good-tempered?” “I can generally,” I answered, “confine myself to sarcasm. It pleases me, and as far as I have been able to notice, does neither harm nor good to anyone else.” “I’ll send you up a boy,” promised Miss Janie. I thanked her. “And now we come to the donkey.” “Nathaniel,” explained Miss Janie, in answer to her father’s look of enquiry. “We don’t really want it.” “Janie,” said Mr. St. Leonard in a tone of authority, “I insist upon being honest.” “I was going to be honest,” retorted Miss Janie, offended. “My daughter Veronica has given me to understand,” I said, “that if I buy her this donkey it will be, for her, the commencement of a new and better life. I do not attach undue importance to the bargain, but one never knows. The influences that make for reformation in human character are subtle and unexpected. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem right to throw a chance away. Added to which, it has occurred to me that a donkey might be useful in the garden.” “He has lived at my expense for upwards of two years,” replied St. Leonard. “I cannot myself see any moral improvement he has brought into my family. What effect he may have upon your children, I cannot say. But when you talk about his being useful in a garden—” “He draws a cart,” interrupted Miss Janie. “So long as someone walks beside him feeding him with carrots. We tried fixing the carrot on a pole six inches beyond his reach. That works all right in the picture: it starts this donkey kicking.” “You know yourself,” he continued with growing indignation, “the very last time your mother took him out she used up all her carrots getting there, with the result that he and the cart had to be hauled home behind a trolley.”