One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the corn-field that an early frost had blighted, and told his wife that they must give it up.  He said, in his weak, hoarse voice, with the catarrhal catching in it, that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm any longer.  The oats had hardly been worth cutting, and now the corn was gone, and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock; if they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes.  Have a vendue, and sell out everything before the snow flew, and let the State take the farm and get what it could for it, and turn over the balance that was left after the taxes; the interest of the savings-bank mortgage would soon eat that up.

The long, loose cough took him, and another cough answered it like an echo from the barn, where his son was giving the horses their feed.  The mild, wan-eyed young man came round the corner presently toward the porch where his father and mother were sitting, and at the same moment a boy came up the lane to the other corner; there were sixteen years between the ages of the brothers, who alone were left of the children born into and borne out of the house.  The young man waited till they were within whispering distance of each other, and then he gasped:  “Where you been?”

The boy answered, promptly, “None your business,” and went up the steps before the young man, with a lop-eared, liver-colored mongrel at his heels.  He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of the porch.  “Dinner over?” he demanded.

His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy’s hands and face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch of yellow hair, and said:  “You go and wash yourself.”  At a certain light in his mother’s eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper.  The oldest son sat down on the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the mountain before them.  They heard the boy whistling behind the house, with sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face while he whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled sound, and sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing into the towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the scuffling of his feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

“Been after them woodchucks ag’in,” his father huskily suggested.

“I guess so,” said the mother.  The brother did not speak; he coughed vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The father began a statement of his affairs.

The mother said:  “You don’t want to go into that; we been all over it before.  If it’s come to the pinch, now, it’s come.  But you want to be sure.”

The man did not answer directly.  “If we could sell off now and get out to where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land—­” He stopped, as if confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had hoped he might not find in his way this time.