“She could not tell me much.  It had been a detail of their common life she had but absently remarked, as though she had lived with a man who collected snail-shells, or studied the post-marks on letters.  She ’had never noticed’—­that was the answer to most of my questions.  No, she did not think there were very many now, though he must have painted ’most a million.  He was always at it, every minute he could spare from farming.  But they had been so poor he had not felt he could afford many canvases.  The paints cost a good deal too.  So he painted them over and over, first one thing and then another, as he happened to fancy.  He painted in the horse-barn.  ‘Had a place rigged up,’ in her phrase, in one corner of the room where the hay was stored, and had cut a big window in the roof that was apt to let in water on the hay if the rain came from the north.

“‘What did he paint?’ ’Oh, anything.  He was queer about that.  He’d paint anything!  He did one picture of nothing but the corner of the barnyard, with a big white sow and some little pigs in the straw, early in the morning, when the dew was on everything.  He had thought quite a lot of that, but he had had to paint over it to make the picture of her little sister with the yellow kittie—­the one she’d sent down to the village to try to sell, the one—­’

“‘Yes, yes,’ I told her, ’the one I saw.  But did he never try to sell any himself?  Did he never even show them to anyone?’

“She hesitated, tried to remember, and said that once when they were very poor, and there was a big doctor’s bill to pay, he had sent a picture down to New York.  But it was sent back.  They had made a good deal of fun of it, the people down there, because it wasn’t finished off enough.  She thought her uncle’s feelings had been hurt by their letter.  The express down and back had cost a good deal too, and the only frame he had got broken.  Altogether, she guessed that discouraged him.  Anyhow, he’d never tried again.  He seemed to get so after a while that he didn’t care whether anybody liked them or even saw them or not—­he just painted them to amuse himself, she guessed.  He seemed to get a good real of comfort out of it.  It made his face very still and smiling to paint.  Nobody around there so much as knew he did it, the farm was so far from neighbors.

“’Twas a real lonely place, she told me, and she had been glad to marry and come down in the valley to live closer to folks.  Her uncle had given her her wedding outfit.  He had done real well by them all, and they were grateful; and now he was getting feeble and had trouble with his heart, they wanted to do something for him.  They had thought, perhaps, they could sell some of his pictures for enough to hire a man to help him with the farm work.  She had heard that pictures were coming into fashion more than they had been, and she had borrowed that one of her little sister and the kittie, and without her uncle’s knowing anything about it, had sent it off.  She was about discouraged waiting for somebody down in the city to make up his mind whether he’d buy it or not.