The vindictive old man, who was as tight as dumpling and buttons could make him, refused it in a drooping tone, and went forth, looking at none.  Mrs. Sumfit turned to all parties, and begged them to say what more, to please Master Gammon, she could have done?  When Anthony was ready to speak of her Dahlia, she obtruded this question in utter dolefulness.  Robert was kindly asked by the farmer to take a pipe among them.  Rhoda put a chair for him, but he thanked them both, and said he could not neglect some work to be done in the fields.  She thought that he feared pain from hearing Dahlia’s name, and followed him with her eyes commiseratingly.

“Does that young fellow attend to business?” said Anthony.

The farmer praised Robert as a rare hand, but one affected with bees in his nightcap,—­who had ideas of his own about farming, and was obstinate with them; “pays you due respect, but’s got a notion as how his way of thinking’s better ’n his seniors.  It’s the style now with all young folks.  Makes a butt of old Mas’ Gammon; laughs at the old man.  It ain’t respectful t’ age, I say.  Gammon don’t understand nothing about new feeds for sheep, and dam nonsense about growing such things as melons, fiddle-faddle, for ’em.  Robert’s a beginner.  What he knows, I taught the young fellow.  Then, my question is, where’s his ideas come from, if they’re contrary to mine?  If they’re contrary to mine, they’re contrary to my teaching.  Well, then, what are they worth?  He can’t see that.  He’s a good one at work—­I’ll say so much for him.”

Old Anthony gave Rhoda a pat on the shoulder.

CHAPTER III

“Pipes in the middle of the day’s regular revelry,” ejaculated Anthony, whose way of holding the curved pipe-stem displayed a mind bent on reckless enjoyment, and said as much as a label issuing from his mouth, like a figure in a comic woodcut of the old style:—­“that’s,” he pursued, “that’s if you haven’t got to look up at the clock every two minutes, as if the devil was after you.  But, sitting here, you know, the afternoon’s a long evening; nobody’s your master.  You can on wi’ your slippers, up wi’ your legs, talk, or go for’ard, counting, twicing, and three-timesing; by George!  I should take to drinking beer if I had my afternoons to myself in the city, just for the sake of sitting and doing sums in a tap-room; if it’s a big tap-room, with pew sort o’ places, and dark red curtains, a fire, and a smell of sawdust; ale, and tobacco, and a boy going by outside whistling a tune of the day.  Somebody comes in.  ‘Ah, there’s an idle old chap,’ he says to himself, (meaning me), and where, I should like to ask him, ’d his head be if he sat there dividing two hundred and fifty thousand by forty-five and a half!”

The farmer nodded encouragingly.  He thought it not improbable that a short operation with these numbers would give the sum in Anthony’s possession, the exact calculation of his secret hoard, and he set to work to stamp them on his brain, which rendered him absent in manner, while Mrs. Sumfit mixed liquor with hot water, and pushed at his knee, doubling in her enduring lips, and lengthening her eyes to aim a side-glance of reprehension at Anthony’s wandering loquacity.