papers that came around his underclothes and inside the packing boxes he has taken away.  So I expected to make something; but he gave me no more than forty-five cents!  He weighed them, and said himself there were thirty pounds.  That ought to have come to sixty cents at least, according to my arithmetic.  But he made out it was all right, and had them all packed up, and went off, though I followed him out to the gate and told him that it didn’t amount to no more than I might have got from the other man at a cent and a half.  He said it was all they were worth; that he wished he could get as much for them.  Then I asked him why he took the trouble to come for them, under the circumstances.  But by that time he was off and down the street.

* * * * *

I was just sitting at the window this morning, and there were Mr. and Mrs. Peebles walking down the street,—­he on one side and she on the other.  I do wonder why they didn’t go on the same side!  If they hadn’t got so far past the gate, I’d have asked them.  I never heard there was any quarrel between them, and it was just as muddy this side of the street as that.  They have been spending their winters in the city lately, and perhaps it’s some new fashion.

I declare it’s worth while to sit at the window now and then, and see what is going on.  I’m usually so busy at the back of the house, I don’t know.  But now Lavinia has taken to going to school with the boys, and they are willing to take care of her, half my work seems taken out of my hands.  Not that she was much in the way for a girl of four, but she might slip out of the gate at any time, as there are so many of those grinding organs around with their monkeys.

* * * * *

Mrs. Carruthers was in yesterday afternoon, and she said the Peebles were looking up the numbers on the doors to find the Wylies.  They got puzzled because the numbers go up one side of the street and down the other, and they haven’t but just been put on.  And it seems that up in the city they have them go across.  It does appear to me shiftless in our town officers, when they undertook to have the streets numbered as they do elsewhere, that they didn’t number them the same way.  But I can’t see but our way is as good, and more sensible than having to cross a muddy street to look up the next number.

* * * * *

Artemas has been gone a whole week.  I told him I would put down the most important things in a diary, and then he can look at it, if he has time, when he comes home.  He thinks it is a more sensible way than writing letters every week.

He expects to be up and down in Texas, and perhaps across the mountains; and in those lawless countries letters would not stand much chance,—­maybe they wouldn’t ever reach him, after I’d had the trouble of writing them.  There’s the expense of stamps too,—­not so very much for one letter, but it counts up.