“Oh, yes, so I was.  Well, I suppose he’ll come, too.  Good-by.”

She skipped away, waving him a farewell with the tail of the silver fox.  Jed, gazing after her, rubbed his chin reflectively.

His indecision concerning the acceptance of the Hunniwell invitation lasted until the day before Thanksgiving.  Then Barbara added her persuasions to those of Captain Sam and his daughter and he gave in.

“If you don’t go, Uncle Jed,” asserted Babbie, “we’re all goin’ to be awfully disappointed, ’specially me and Petunia—­and Mamma—­and Uncle Charlie.”

“Oh, then the rest of you folks won’t care, I presume likely?”

Babbie thought it over.  “Why, there aren’t any more of us,” she said.  “Oh, I see!  You’re joking again, aren’t you, Uncle Jed?  ’Most everybody I know laughs when they make jokes, but you don’t, you look as if you were going to cry.  That’s why I don’t laugh sometimes right off,” she explained, politely.  “If you was really feeling so bad it wouldn’t be nice to laugh, you know.”

Jed laughed then, himself.  “So Petunia would feel bad if I didn’t go to Sam’s, would she?” he inquired.

“Yes,” solemnly.  “She told me she shouldn’t eat one single thing if you didn’t go.  She’s a very high-strung child.”

That settled it.  Jed argued that Petunia must on no account be strung higher than she was and consented to dine at the Hunniwells’.

The day before Thanksgiving brought another visitor to the windmill shop, one as welcome as he was unexpected.  Jed, hearing the door to the stock room open, shouted “Come in” from his seat at the workbench in the inner room.  When his summons was obeyed he looked up to see a khaki-clad figure advancing with extended hand.

“Why, hello, Major!” he exclaimed.  “I’m real glad to—­ Eh, ’tain’t Major Grover, is it?  Who—­ Why, Leander Babbitt!  Well, well, well!”

Young Babbitt was straight and square-shouldered and brown.  Military training and life at Camp Devens had wrought the miracle in his case which it works in so many.  Jed found it hard to recognize the stoop-shouldered son of the hardware dealer in the spruce young soldier before him.  When he complimented Leander upon the improvement the latter disclaimed any credit.

“Thank the drill master second and yourself first, Jed,” he said.  “They’ll make a man of a fellow up there at Ayer if he’ll give ’em half a chance.  Probably I shouldn’t have had the chance if it hadn’t been for you.  You were the one who really put me up to enlisting.”

Jed refused to listen.  “Can’t make a man out of a punkinhead,” he asserted.  “If you hadn’t had the right stuff in you, Leander, drill masters nor nobody else could have fetched it out.  How do you like belongin’ to Uncle Sam?”

Young Babbitt liked it and said so.  “I feel as if I were doing something at last,” he said; “as if I was part of the biggest thing in the world.  Course I’m only a mighty little part, but, after all, it’s something.”