“I should say you might count on forty bushels an acre,” remarked Nicholas cheerfully, as he lifted a detached root from a broken hill.  “It’s a fair yield, isn’t it?”

Amos Burr shook his head and muttered that there was “no tellin’.  Peanuts air one of the things thar’s no countin’ on,” he added.  “Wheat air another, corn air another, oats air another.”

“Life is another,” concluded Nicholas lightly.  “Still we live and still we raise wheat and oats and corn.  But I wish you’d look into market gardening.  I believe it would pay you better.”

“’Tain’t no use,” returned Amos, with his accustomed pessimism. “’Tain’t no use my plantin’ as long as the government ain’t goin’ to move, nohow.  It’s been promisin’ to help the farmer ever since the war, an’ it ain’t done nothin’ for him yet but tax him.”

But Nicholas, to avoid his father’s political drift, fell to talking with one of the negro workers.

Several hours later, when he had changed his farm clothes, he joined Eugenia in the pasture and walked with her to Battle Hall, where the general received him with ready, if condescending, hospitality.  Eugenia had instructed her family upon the changed conditions of Nicholas’s social standing, but her logic was powerless to convince her father that Amos Burr’s son was any better than Amos Burr had been before him.

“Pish!  Pish!” he exclaimed testily, “the boy’s not a lawyer—­only gentlemen belong to the bar, but there’s nobody too high or too low to be a farmer.  Polite to him?  Did you ever see me impolite in my own house even to a chimney sweep?”

“I never saw a chimney sweep in your own house,” Eugenia retorted, whereupon he pinched her cheek and accused her of “making fun of her old father.”

Now, when Nicholas sat down on one of the long green benches on the porch, the general conversed with him as he conversed with the chicken sellers who came of an afternoon to receive payment for their luckless fowls.

“This’ll be a busy season for you,” he observed cheerfully, in the slightly elevated voice in which he addressed his inferiors.  “You’ll be cutting your corn before long and seeding your winter crops.  What are you planting this fall?”

He could not be induced to engage upon social topics with the young man or to allude in the most distant manner to his legal profession.  He was a Burr, and a Burr was a small farmer, nothing more.

“We’re ploughing for oats now, sir,” responded Nicholas diffidently, “and we’re going to seed a little rye with clover—­if the clover’s killed, the rye’ll last.”

“I should advise you to look after the land,” said the general, stuffing the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and pressing it down with his fat thumb.  “What you need is to plant it in cow-peas and turn them down.  There’s nothing like them for fertilising.”

Nicholas, who was listening attentively, rose to shake hands with Miss Chris who appeared in the doorway.