“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.”

Gowdy took me into the conversation, but he sat where he could look at Rowena.  He seemed to be carrying on a silent conversation with her with his eyes, while he talked to me, looking into my eyes a good deal too, and stooping toward me in that intimate, confidential way of his.  When I told him that I thought he was not getting as much done as he ought to with all the hands he had, he said nobody knew it better than he; but could I suggest any remedy?  Now on the canal, we had to organize our work, and I had seen a lot of public labor done between Albany and Buffalo; so I had my ideas as to people’s getting in one another’s way.  I told him that his men were working in too large gangs, as I looked at it.  Where he had twenty breaking-teams following one another, if one broke his plow, or ran on a boulder and had to file it, the whole gang had to stop for him, or run around him and make a balk in the work.  I thought it would be better to have not more than two or three breaking on the same “land,” and then they would not be so much in one another’s way, and wouldn’t have so good an excuse for stopping and having jumping matches and boxing bouts and story-tellings.  Then their work could be compared, they could be made to work against one another in a kind of competition, and the bad ones could be weeded out.  It would be the same with corn-plowing, and some other work.