“Souse it in a brook, they will, till they have it soggy. They won’t eat it till then.”
While we were looking, a morose-looking old man drove into the yard. He checked his horse, and sat gazing straight before him with a wooden expression.
“Hullo, Uncle!” said Sam. “Come for apples?”
The old man shook his head, but said nothing.
He shook his head also at this, and at every other suggestion, and never opened his lips. After a while Sam, who seemed to know his ways, nodded cheerfully, said, “Well, tell us when you get ready to!” and turned towards the house.
The old man waited till he had gone twenty feet, and then said grudgingly:
“I come to see that there cow. You finish with your company! I’ll wait.”
“That’s old Ammi Peaslee,” Susan whispered. “He always acts odd. Oh, no, no relation; everyone on the road calls him Uncle: ‘Uncle Batch’ when he’s not round.”
“He didn’t mean to be a batch” (bachelor), she went on reflectively; and then with some shamefacedness, she told us how Mr. Peaselee had once been engaged to be married to Miss Charity Jordan (who lived alone in the big brick Jordan house at the corner) for twenty-five long years. One day the lady’s roof needed shingling, and she called on her suitor to shingle it. (“She never could bear to spend money, nor he either, and it’s a fact that neither one of them had much to spend!”)
He did it, and did a good job; but afterwards, thinking it but right and fair, he brought a set of shirts for his sweetheart to make.
“She made them, _and she sent him in a bill_; and he paid it, and never spoke to her again from that day to this, and that is fifteen years ago.
“Now hear me gossip! I am fairly ashamed!” Susan cried out.
The barn was sweet with hay. Part of the season’s pumpkins were piled in the grain room, and lit up the dusk with their dark gold. Some of them still lay in golden piles in the barn-yard. The ears of corn, yellow and red, lay in separate heaps.
“I miss Mother!” Susan said (she spoke of Sam’s mother, who had passed on the year before). “She saw to all the pretty things about the farm. She used to hang the corn in patterns on the ceiling-hooks, red and yellow. She’d place the onions in amongst the corn, in ropes or bunches, and contrive all kinds of pretty notions.”