We had reached the yard. Nathaniel was standing with his head stretched out above the closed half of his stable door. I noticed points of resemblance between him and Veronica herself: there was about him a like suggestion of resignation, of suffering virtue misunderstood; his eye had the same wistful, yearning expression with which Veronica will stand before the window gazing out upon the purple sunset, while people are calling to her from distant parts of the house to come and put her things away. Miss Janie, bending over him, asked him to kiss her. He complied, but with a gentle, reproachful look that seemed to say, “Why call me back again to earth?” It made me mad with him. I was wrong in thinking Miss Janie not a pretty girl. Hers is that type of beauty that escapes attention by its own perfection. It is the eccentric, the discordant, that arrests the roving eye. To harmony one has to attune oneself. “I believe,” said Miss Janie, as she drew away, wiping her cheek, “one could teach that donkey anything.” Apparently she regarded willingness to kiss her as indication of exceptional amiability. “Except to work,” commented her father. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “If you take that donkey off my hands and promise not to send it back again, why, you can have it.” “For nothing?” demanded Janie woefully. “For nothing,” insisted her father. “And if I have any argument, I’ll throw in the cart.” Miss Janie sighed and shrugged her shoulders. It was arranged that Hopkins should deliver Nathaniel into my keeping some time the next day. Hopkins, it appeared, was the only person on the farm who could make the donkey go. “I don’t know what it is,” said St. Leonard, “but he has a way with him.” “And now,” I said, “there remains but Dick.” “The lad I saw yesterday?” suggested St. Leonard. “Good-looking young fellow.” “He is a nice boy,” I said. “I don’t really think I know a nicer boy than Dick; and clever, when you come to understand him. There is only one fault I have to find with Dick: I don’t seem able to get him to work.” Miss Janie was smiling. I asked her why. “I was thinking,” she answered, “how close the resemblance appears to be between him and Nathaniel.” It was true. I had not thought of it. “The mistake,” said St. Leonard, “is with ourselves. We assume every boy to have the soul of a professor, and every girl a genius for music. We pack off our sons to cram themselves with Greek and Latin, and put our daughters down to strum at the piano. Nine times out of ten it is sheer waste of time. They sent me to Cambridge, and said I was lazy. I was not lazy. I was not intended by nature for a Senior Wrangler. I did not see the good of being a Senior Wrangler. Who wants a world of Senior Wranglers? Then why start every young man trying? I wanted to be a farmer. If intelligent lads were taught farming as a business, farming would pay. In the name of commonsense—”