“Johnnie-jump-ups, Miss Rose Mary, don’t you never do nothing like that to me!” exclaimed Mr. Rucker with a very fire of desperation lighting his thin face.  “If Mis’ Rucker was to see one verse of that there poetry I would have to plow the whole creek-bottom corn-field jest to pacify her.  I’ve done almost persuaded her to hire Bob Nickols to do it with his two teams and young Bob, on account of a sciattica in my left side that plowing don’t do no kind of good to.  I have took at least two bottles of her sasparilla and sorgum water and have let Granny put a plaster as big and loud-smelling as a mill swamp on my back jest to git that matter of the corn-field fixed up, and here you most go and stir up the ruckus again with that poor little Trees in the Breeze poem that Gid took and had printed unbeknownst to me.  Please, mam, burn them papers!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell her for the world if you don’t want me to, Mr. Rucker!” exclaimed Rose Mary in distress.  “But I am sure she would be proud of—­”

“No, it looks like women don’t take to poetry for a husband; they prefers the hefting of a hoe and plow handles.  It’s hard on Mis’ Rucker that I ain’t got no constitution to work with, and I feel it right to keep all my soul-squirmings and sech outen her sight.  The other night as I was a-putting Petie to bed, while she and Bob was at the front gate a-trying to trade on that there plowing, a mighty sweet little verse come to me about

    “’The little shoes in mother’s hand
    Nothing like ’em in the land,’

and the tears was in my eyes so thick ’cause I didn’t have nobody to say ’em to that one dropped down on Pete and made him think I was a-going to wash his face, and sech another ruckus as she had to come in to, as mad as hops!  If I feel like it, I’m a-going to clean every weed outen the garden for her next week to try and make up to her for—­”

“Aw, Mr. Rucker, M-i-s-t-e-r Rucker, come home to get ready for supper,” came in a loud, jovial voice that carried across the street like the tocsin of a bass drum.  The Rucker home sat in a clump of sugar maples just opposite the Briars, and was square, solid and unadorned of vine or flower.  A row of bright tin buckets hung along the picket fence that separated the yard from the store enclosure, and rain-barrels sat under the two front gutters with stolid practicability, in contrast to the usual relegation of such store-houses of the rainfall to the back of the house and the planting of ferns and water plants under the front sprouts, as was the custom from the beginning of time in Sweetbriar.  Mrs. Rucker in a clean print dress and with glossy and uncompromisingly smoothed hair stood at the newly whitewashed front gate.  “Send him on home, Rose Mary, or grass’ll grow in his tracks and yours, too, if he can hold you long enough,” she added by way of badinage.