My cousin-in-law waved a nervous hand toward the sternly silent figure as it stepped doggedly behind the straining team, the head bent forward, the eyes fixed on the horses’ heels.

“There!” he said.  “There is an example of what I mean.  Is there another race on earth which could produce a man in such a situation who would not on such a day sing, or whistle, or at least hold up his head and look at all the earthly glories about him?”

I was silent, but not for lack of material for speech.  ’Niram’s reasons for austere self-control were not such as I cared to discuss with a man of my cousin’s mental attitude.  As we sat looking at him the noon whistle from the village blew and the wise old horses stopped in the middle of a furrow.  ’Niram unharnessed them, led them to the shade of a tree, and put on their nose-bags.  Then he turned and came toward the house.

“Don’t I seem to remember,” murmured my cousin under his breath, “that, even though he is a New-Eng-lander, he has been known to make up errands to your kitchen to see your pretty Ev’leen Ann?”

I looked at him hard; but he was only gazing down, rather cross-eyed, on his grizzled mustache, with an obvious petulant interest in the increase of white hairs in it.  Evidently his had been but a chance shot.  ’Niram stepped up on the grass at the edge of the porch.  He was so tall that he overtopped the railing easily, and, reaching a long arm over to where I sat, he handed me a small package done up in yellowish tissue-paper.  Without hat-raisings, or good-mornings, or any other of the greetings usual in a more effusive civilization, he explained briefly: 

“My stepmother wanted I should give you this.  She said to thank you for the grape-juice.”  As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set blue eyes, and when he had delivered his message he held his peace.

I expressed myself with the babbling volubility of one whose manners have been corrupted by occasional sojourns in the city.  “Oh, ’Niram!” I cried protestingly, as I opened the package and took out an exquisitely wrought old-fashioned collar.  “Oh, ’Niram!  How could your stepmother give such a thing away?  Why, it must be one of her precious old relics.  I don’t want her to give me something every time I do some little thing for her.  Can’t a neighbor send her in a few bottles of grape-juice without her thinking she must pay it back somehow?  It’s not kind of her.  She has never yet let me do the least thing for her without repaying me with something that is worth ever so much more than my trifling services.”

When I had finished my prattling, ’Niram repeated, with an accent of finality, “She wanted I should give it to you.”

The older man stirred in his chair.  Without looking at him I knew that his gaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on the tablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the other’s action and manner.