54 THE GARDEN OF A 



or a week at ploughing, haying, or raking, but to 

 take a regular place for regular pay would be to 

 become the male equivalent of the " livin'-out girl," 

 and socially degrading to one owning a makeshift 

 house and a few acres of land. So, without trade 

 training, the native "chores" about at painting, 

 carpentering, raising a few vegetables, or letting 

 the shingles fall from his roofs and the land run 

 out until the elder children are old enough to work 

 in a factory, when they all move " over town," and 

 some old country peasant, either Celt, Dane, Pole, 

 or Hun, buys the place of the mortgagee, and begins 

 to pull it together on a wholly different plane. 



It was on the first day of November and my 

 fourteenth birthday that Peter Schmidt and family 

 came to live with us. I was sitting on the pasture 

 fence cracking butternuts, which finger-dyeing occu- 

 pation so absorbed me that I did not hear approach- 

 ing footsteps, and was therefore startled by a voice 

 that asked in slow and inverted sentences, if the 

 " honoured doctor " lived near by. 



Looking up, I saw a strange procession that 

 halted as the man, its leader, spoke. This man 

 was perhaps forty, though he might have been 

 either older or younger. His bent shoulders and 

 warped legs indicated the former age, while his 



