“Do you know what you are talking about?” Doctor Prescott said, sharply; for this plain proposition that he overreach the other aroused him to a show of fairness.

Squire Merritt laughed.  “Oh, I know you’ll get the best of the bargain,” he returned.

Then the doctor waxed suspicious.  This readiness to take the worst of a bargain while perfectly cognizant of it puzzled him.  He wondered if perchance this easy-going, card-playing, fishing Squire had, after all, some axe of policy to grind.  “What do you expect to make out of it?” he asked, bluntly.

“Nothing.  I am not even sure that I have any active hope of a higher rate of interest in the other world for it.  I am not as sound in the doctrines as you, doctor.”  Squire Eben laughed, but the other turned on him sternly.

“If you are doing this for the sake of Abel Edwards’s widow and her children, you are acting from a mistaken sense of charity, and showing poor judgment,” said he.

Squire Eben laughed again.  “You made no reply to my proposition, doctor,” he said.

“You are in earnest?”

“I am.”

“You understand what you are doing?”

“I certainly do.  I am giving you between fifteen and sixteen hundred dollars’ worth of land for a thousand.”

“There is no merit nor charity in such foolish measures as this,” said the doctor, half suspicious that there was more behind this, and not put to shame but aroused to a sense of superiority by such drivelling idiocy of benevolence.

“Dare say you’re right, doctor,” returned Squire Eben.  “I won’t even cheat you out of the approval of Heaven.  Will you meet me at Means’s office to-morrow, with the necessary documents for the transfer?  We had better go around to Mrs. Edwards’s afterwards and inform her, I suppose.”

“I will meet you at Means’s office at ten o’clock to-morrow morning,” said the doctor, shortly.  “Good-evening,” and with that turned on his heel.  However, when he had opened the door he turned again and called curtly and magisterially after Squire Eben:  “I advise you to cultivate a little more business foresight for the sake of your wife and child,” and Squire Eben answered back: 

“Thank you—­thank you, doctor; guess you’re right,” and then began to whistle like a boy as he went down the avenue of pines.

Through lack of remunerative industry, and easy-going habits, his share of the old Merritt property had dwindled considerably; he had none too much money to spend at the best, and now he had bartered away a goodly slice of his paternal acres for no adequate worldly return.  He knew it all, he felt a half-whimsical dismay as he went home, and yet the meaning which underlies the letter of a good action was keeping his heart warm.