“Max says Sally is crazy to live in it.  But that can’t be because she realizes its value.”

“No, she’s just old-fashioned child enough to like it because it’s homelike, and her uncle and grandfather lived in it, not because it’s such a swell type of the real old thing that people rave over now.”

“Max isn’t the sort to care for it either.  But he has an eye on the cash.  I shall have to put up a fair price, all right, to get it.  I’ll try bluffing first, though.  He’s too much of an office grind to care for anything else, so long as he gets his money.  I say, won’t that gateway be a corker, when it’s put right?”

They walked on out of hearing, but Max had heard all that was necessary to make him tingle.

“Oh, it will be a corker, will it?” he said to himself, as he made for the back of the house by way of the pine grove.  “Maybe it will, old, man—­but not when you put it right!  An office grind, am I?  Too dull to know a good thing when I own it, eh?  And you’ll try bluffing, will you?  All right, bluff away—­and much good may it do you!  I’d sell it to Jarve Burnside before I’d sell it to you, but I—­Hello, where are you going?”

He had almost run into Jarvis, hastily emerging from the kitchen door with a smoking jack-o’-lantern, the declining candle of which had made of it both a wreck and the source of a horrible odour.  Jarvis cast the pumpkin to one side and wiped his hands on his handkerchief.  “Just prevented a small conflagration of corn-stalks,” he explained.  “What are you doing, prowling round your own back door?”

“Making up my mind not to sell this place to you or to anybody else,” said Max, promptly, speaking under the impulse of his irritation.

“Good work!  I don’t blame you.  I certainly don’t want it—­if you do.  I hope you won’t go back on letting me rent a few acres, though, to try my hand at farming, in the spring?”

“Jarve,”—­Max sat down on the kitchen step—­“do you seriously think a fellow could make a living off this land—­taking into account all the squash-bugs and fruit-tree pests and tomato-grubs and every other thing that I’ve always understood makes the life of the farmer miserable?”

“I think,” replied Jarvis, laughing a little at Max’s way of putting it, but awake to the importance of discussing the matter seriously, if Max showed an inclination to do so, “that trying to do it, with the help of all the experience that modern experiment stations have placed at our hands, would be about the most interesting thing possible.  You might not want to give up all other business till you had proved that you really could do it, but I certainly do think the thing would be well worth trying.  It’s being attempted more and more these days by educated men, college graduates and professional men of all ranks, partly for the pure interest of the thing, partly because the out-door life is about the best worth living.  Look at Don Ferry, for an example.  Could he possibly have the hold he has on that crowd of his at the Old Dutch if he weren’t a man made of substantial flesh and blood, his brain as healthy and his heart as warm as exercise and oxygen can make them?—­Well, perhaps he could, if he were one of your pale and scholarly ghosts, but I doubt it.”