"I wun't work with niggers!" said Rowena. "That Pinck has brought a yellow girl here from Dubuque, and she's goin' to wait on the table as she did in Dubuque. They claim they was married the last time he was back there, an' he brought her here. I wun't work with her. I wun't demean myself into a black slave--. But tell me, Jake," coming over and sitting by me, "how you're gittin' along. Off here we don't hear no news from folks over to the Centre at all. We go to the new railroad, an' never see any one from over there--." "Exceptin' Magnus," said Ma Fewkes. "You ain't married, yet, be you?" Rowena asked. "I should say not! Me married!" We sat then for quite a while without saying anything. Rowena sat smoothing out a calico apron she had on. Finally she said: "Am I wearin' anything you ever seen before, Jake?" Looking her over carefully I saw nothing I could remember. I told her so at last, and said she was dressed awful nice now and looked lots better than I had ever seen her looking. My own rags were sorely on my mind just then. "This apern," said she, spreading it out for me to see, "is the back breadth of that dress you give me back along the road. I'm goin' to keep it always. I hain't goin' to wear it ever only when you come to see me!" This was getting embarrassing; but her next remarks made it even more so. "How old be you, Jake?" she asked. "I'll be twenty," said I, "the twenty-seventh day of next July." "We're jest of an age," she ventured--and after a long pause, "I should think it would be awful hard work to keep the house and do your work ou'-doors." I told her that it was, and spread the grief on very thick, thinking all the time of the very precious way in which I hoped sometime to end my loneliness, and give myself a house companion: in the very back of my head even going over the plans I had made for an "upright" to the house, with a bedroom, a spare room, a dining-room and a sitting-room in it. "Well," said she, "for a smart, nice-lookin' young man, like you, it's your own fault--" 5 And then there was a tap on the door. Rowena started, turned toward the door, made as if to get up to open it, and then sat down again, her face first flushed and then pale. Her mother opened the door, and there stood Buckner Gowdy. He came in, with his easy politeness and sat down among us like an old friend. "I didn't know you had company," said he; "but I now remember that Mr. Vandemark is an old friend." He always called me Mr. Vandemark, because, I guess, I owned seven hundred and twenty acres of land, and was not all mortgaged up. Virginia told me afterward, that where they came from people who owned so much land were the quality, and were treated more respectfully than the poor whites. "Yes, sir," said Old Man Fewkes, "Jake is the onliest real old friend we got hereabouts."