Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 215, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1916 — The IDYL of TWIN FIRES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The IDYL of TWIN FIRES

by WAITER PRICHARD EATON

SYNOPSIS. I grow tired of my work as a college Instructor and buy a New England farm on sight. I inspect my farm and go to board, at Bert Temple’s. Bert helps me to hire a carpenter and a farmer. Hard Cider, the carpenter, estimates the repairs and changes necessary on the house. Mike commences plowing. I start to prune the orchard trees *

Now we hope the professor is going to come out in his true colors and not leave us longer In doubt as to why he bought his farm. He is Into it deep enough for another day to determine his attitude.

CHAPTER IV. Humbled by a Drag Scraper. One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the garden. I am by nature a trusting soul, anyway {which no woman and possibly no wise. man ever is where carpenters, builders and plumbers are concerned), and I trusted Hard Cider implicitly. He told me the plumbers were “doin’ all right.” and I believed him. That he himself ■was doing all right my own eyes told me, for he had by now reached the south rooms, removed the dividing partition, revealing the old, hand-hewn oak beam at the top, and was cutting a double door out in the center on either side of the great oak upright, toward my future sundial lawn. I stood in this new door, looking back at my twin fireplaces, with their plainpaneled old mantels. “Mr. Howard,” said I, “those mantels are about as plain as you could piake ’em, and yet they are very handtome, somehow, dingy as they are.” “It’s the lines." said Hard Cider. *Jest the right lines. Lower ’em six Inches, and whar'd they be?” “Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from one to the other, and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room from the center, making it the back of a double settle?” I asked. “I'm a carpenter,’’ Hard replied laconically. I took his pencil and sketched what I wanted on a clean board. i “Yer got too much curve on the base and arms o’ them settles,” he said judicially. He took the pencil away from me, and made a quick," neat, accurate sketch of just what I instantly saw I did want. I shrugged my shoulders. “Go ahead!” said I. “What did you ask me to draw it for in the first place?” “Folks likes to think they hev their own idees,” he answered. I turned away, through the new south door, into the May sunshine. The pergola was not commenced. In fact, I had decided not to build it till the following spring. Those beastly painters whom I had forgotten were going to eat up too much of my slender capital. Before me stretched the 250 feet of plowed slope which was to be my sundial lawn. At the end of it was my line of stakes, where the ramblers were to climb. Beyond that was the vegetable garden, newly harrowed and fertilized, where Mike and Joe were busily working, the one planting peas, the other setting out a row of beets. The horse was not in evidence. I could have him at last, to make my lawn! I ran around the house to the stable, put on the harness, hitched him,to my new drag scraper, and drove him to the slope. The ground here sloped down eastwarti toward the brook, and If I was to have a level lawn south of my house, I should have to remove at least two feet of soil from the western end and deposit it on the eastern end. I wisely decided to start close to the house. Hauling at the handles of the heavy scraper and yelling ‘‘Back up, there!" at the horse, 1 got the steel scoop into the ground at the line of my proposed grape arbor, tipped down the “blades and cried, “Giddup!” I hung to the reins as best I could, twisting them about my wrist, and the horse stairted obediently forward. The scoop did Its work very nicely. In fact, it was quite full after we had gone six feet, and I had only to let the horse drag it the remaining 94 feet of the proposed width of the lawn, and empty it. As the scraper covered a furrow but two feet wide, that meant 125 furrows to scrape my entire lawn as planned, and at least twenty trips to the furrow. I did some rapid multiplication, dropped the reins and moved toward my stakes. I saw that Joe and Mike were looking at me. “I think," said I, with some dignity, as I began to pull the stakes up, “that this Jawn will look better square. As It’s a hundred feat broad, a hundred feet will be far enough to extend it from the bouse.” “Sure." said Mike, “the big road

scraper ’llbe over here tomorrow, scrapin’ the road, and it do be easier an’ quicker to borry that.” In some ways, I consider this remark of Mike's, under the circumstances, one of the most gentlemanly I ever heard! Aud I jiynped at bis suggestion. “Mike,’’ said I, “I'll admit this job is bigger than I thought. How can I borrow the road scraper?” “Sure, ain’>t me frind Dan Morrissey one o’ the selictmen?" said Mike, “and ain’t he the road boss, and ain’t he willin’ to earn an extra penny so for the town ?” “H’h,” said I; “for the town! Well, I've got to have this lawn! You get your friend Dan in tile morning. • Just the same, I don’t love the town so much that I want a 250-foot lawn.” Noon came and found me with aching arms and strained shoulder sockets. I had brought some lunch, to save the walk back to Mrs. Temple’s, and I took it into my big south room to eat it. Hard was in there eating his. The plumbers were eating theirs in the new kitchen, already completed. Hard, I found, had begun the bookcase, which was just the height of the mantels. He had been preparing the top molding with his universal plane when noon came, and the sweet shavings lay curled on the floor. I scuffed my feet in them, and even hung one from my ear, as children do, while gard Cider regarded me scornfully. “I’m going to have great times in this room!” I exclaimed. “Books between the fireplaces, books along the walls, just a few pictures, including my Hiroshiges, over the mantels, my desk by the west window, and out there the green garden! A man ought to write something pretty good in this room, eh?” Hard looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I don’t know nothin’ about writin’,” he said, “but It ’pears to me a feller could write most anywhar pervided he had somethin’ ter say.” Whereupon Hard concluded by biting into a large piece of prune pie. The Yankee temperament is occasionally depressing! I went outdoors again, eating my doughnuts as I walked, and strolled into the vegetable garden to survey the staked rows which denoted beets and peas. Then I went down the slope into my little stand of pines, into the cool hush of them, and unconsciously my brain relaxed in the bath of their peace, and

for ten minutes I lay on the needles, neither asleep nor awake, just blissfully vacant. Then I returned to my scooping, marvelously restored. six o’clock, when, palm-sore and weary. I drank a great dipperful of water from my copper pump in the kitchen, took a last look at Hard's bookcase, and tramped up the dusty road to supper. Mrs. Temple was beaming when I came down from my bath. “Well,” said she, “in the first place, I’ve got you the housekeeper I want” ■ “By which I infer that she’s the one I want, too?” I asked. “Of course,” said Mrs. Temple, on whom irony bad no effect. “She's Mrs. Pillig, from Slab City, and she’s an artist In pies. Pillig ain’t dead, worse luck, but he’s whar he won’t trouble you. I guess Peter won’t trouble you none, neither. He’s a nice boy, and he’ll be awful handy round the place.” “Peter Pillig!” I exclaimed. “There ain’t no such animal! If there is, Dickens was his grandfather. How old Is Peter?"

“Peter’s eleven,” Mrs. Bert replied. “He’s real nice and bright. His mother’s brought him up fine. Anyhow, she was a Corliss.” “But, eugenically speaking, Peter may have a predisposition to follow in father’s footsteps, which I infer led toward the little green swinging doors,” I protested. "Speakin’ U. S. A., tommyrot!” said Mrs. Temple. “Anyhow, it’s the door o’ the drugstore in this town. They sell more’n sody water down to Danforth’s.” “What am I to pay the author of Peter and the pies?” I asked. “Well, seein’s how you keep Peter, as it were, and Mrs. Pillig calc’lates she can rent her house up to Slab City, she's goin’ to come to you for twenty dollars a month. She’s wuth it, too. You’ll have the best kept and cleanest house in Bentford.” .s I rose from the table solemnly. “Mrs. Temple,” said I, “I accept Mrs. Pillig, Peter and the pies at these terms, but only on one condition: She is never to clean my study!” “Why?" asked Mrs. Temple. “Because,” said I, “you can never tell where an orderly woman will put things.” Bert chuckled as he filled his pipe. Mrs. Temple grinned herself. I was about to make a triumphant exit, when these words from Mrs. Temple’s lips arrested me: “Bert," she said, “did you clean the buggy today? You know you gotter go over ter the deepot tonjorrow an’ git that boarder.” “That what?” I cried. Mrs. Bert’s eyes half closed with a purely feminine delight. “Oh, ain’t I told you?” she said innocently. “We’re goin’ ter hev another boarder, a young lady. From Noo York, too. Her health’s broke down, she says, only that’s not the way she said it, and somehow she heard of us. We ain’t never taken many boarders, but I guess our name’s in that old railroad advertisin’ book. I wouldn’t hev took her, only I thought maybe you wuz kind o’ lonesome here with jest us.” “Mrs. Temple,” said I, “your solicitude quite overwhelms me. Comfort me with petticoats! Good Lord! Aud an anemic, too! I’ll bet she has nerves! When can Mrs. Pillig come to me, woman?” Mrs. Bert's eyes closed still farther. “Oh, your house ain’t near ready yet,” she said. “Why, the painters ain’t even began.” - . I fled to my chamber and hauled forth a manuscript. A female boarder! “Hang Mrs. Temple!” I muttered, reading a whole paragraph of manuscript without taking in a word of it.

CHAPTER V. The Hermit Sings. - - The next morning I demanded that’ MrS. Temple again put me up some lunch. “For,” said I. “I’m going to postpone meeting this broken-down wreck of a perhaps once proud female as long, as possible.” ‘“Maybe ’when you see her drive by you’ll be sorry,” Mrs. Bert smiled. “I shall be working on the south side of the house,” I retorted. I had not been long at my place, Indeed. I had scarcely finished watering my seedbed and carting out my daily stint of two barrowloads of slash from the orchard, when I heard the road scraper rattling over the bridge by the brook. Mike came from the vegetable garden and met his “frind Morrissy,” to whom I was ceremoniously presented. The’ scraper was a large affair with flat-tired Iron wheels and a blade eight feet Jong. The way that eightfoot blade, with four horses hauling It. peeled off the old furrows and brought the top soil down from the high side to the low made my poor efforts with the scoop look puny enough. The lawn was shaping up so fast that I began once more to grow expansive. “It really won’t be square.” thought I, “because my pergola will cut off twelve feet of the length, and if I have flower beds by the roses they’ll cut off some more. I guess those roses ought to be one hundred and twelve feet from the house.” I threw down my shovel, went over to the row of stakes, and moved them south again, twenty-five feet having added thirteen feet as I walked; then I called out to “frind, Morrissy” to bring his scraper.

A day fooled away leveling off a place for a sun-dial lawnl Evidently the esthetic side of tilling the soil appeals to this gentleman-farmer. But why does he object to Mrs. Temple taking In a female boarder?

(TO BE

Mrs. Temple Was Beaming When Came Down From My Bath.