“I expect you’re tired,” said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned.  “It’s a pretty quiet place here—­ain’t much of a village, but then you said you wanted a quiet place to write in.  I guess you’ll be s’prised—­there’s another orther here.  Maybe you know him, his name’s Longworth, John Longworth?  Don’t!  Why, he lives to New York!  No, he ain’t right here in the house, he’s across the street to the Bangses’, but you’ll see him,” she said, encouragingly.  “It’ll be awful pleasant for you two orthers to get acquainted.  The Bangses don’t keep cows, an’ every night at milkin’ time, over he comes to get a glass o’ warm milk; guess he likes to talk to our men-folks.  Old Bangs ain’t much comp’ny for anybody, let alone a writer.  He’s got a man with him to wait on him; a kind o’ nurse, I b’lieve.  He was near dead before he came here, though he looks pretty smart now—­had a fever.  Some of the folks here hev got it around he was out of his head, a man so, a-settin’ around out o’ doors, writin’ from mornin’ till night.  Lord, how mad it made the Bangses!” Mrs. Hopper indulged in an abrupt retrospective laugh of enjoyment.  “They was so set up, havin’ a writer there, an’ Mary Bangs was pretty well taken down when I told her we was a-goin’ to have one here.  She acted as if she didn’t b’lieve there was more’n one orther to New York, an’ that was Mr. Longworth,” continued Mrs. Hopper, regarding me with a proprietor’s pride, as I removed my hat and hung it on a nail driven in the wall.  I smiled as I reflected that I, too, should doubtless be looked on with suspicion as a fit subject for a straight-jacket, if I, an able-bodied young woman, should sit “out o’ doors” with my writing, while my presumable betters were working.

“Well, I guess I’ll go down now,” said Mrs. Hopper, after a brief pause, in which she examined my gown.  “I expect you want y’r dinner.  We live a good piece from the store, Miss Marriott an’ any time if you should get out of ink, don’t make any bones of asking for it.  We’ve got some right here in the house, an’ you’re as welcome to it as if you was my own daughter.”

I was glad to find, at dinner, that the family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Hopper only, with the exception of a couple of farm-hands, whose lumbering tread down the back-stairs wakened me each morning about four.  I found Mr. Hopper a tall, bent old man, with meek, faded blue eyes, and a snowy frill of beard.  He had an especially sweet and pathetic voice, with a little quaver in it, like a bashful girl’s.

He laid down his knife and fork, and looked at me with an air of gentle inquiry, as I took my seat at the table.  “Mrs. Hopper tells me you’re a literary,” he said at length.  I’m afraid I replied, “Yes?” with the rising inflection of the village belle, nothing else occurring to me to say.

“Well,” said Mr. Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to leave the table, “it’s in our fam’ly some too.  And in Ma’s.  One o’ my uncles and one o’ her brothers.”  He shuffled out of the room with a placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious pride, “La, pa, Jim never wrote more’n two or three pieces.”