you forget that Bessie's voice is a trifle too high and too sweet, and
that she is inclined to be at times a bit overly religious and too
watchful of what she calls "vice" in people.

Over in front of the hotel Seth Curtis is standing up in his wagon and
sawing his horses' mouths cruelly. Seth has been so viciously
mistreated in his youth that he now abuses at times the very things
that he loves. He has paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece for
those horses and is mighty proud of them. But Seth's temper is never
good on a rainy day. Rain means no teaming and a money loss. Seth is
a mite too conscious of money. At any rate, the loss of even a dollar
makes him a sullen and at the least provocation an angry man. He isn't
liked much except by his wife and children.

In his home Seth is gentle and kind. Maybe because here he finds the
love and trust that all his life he has craved and been denied. Few of
his neighbors know how he laughs and romps and sings with his children
and what wonderful yarns he tells them, all made up out of his own head.

He is known to come from York State and has a Yankee shrewdness that
some people say can at times be called something else. He is wide and
square-shouldered though short, has a round stubborn head of reddish
hair with a promising bald spot, close-set blue eyes and an annoying,
almost an insulting habit of paying all his bills promptly and asking
odds and favors of nobody.

To-day he was to have taken a load of stones, granite niggerheads of
all sizes, up to Colonel Stratton's place. The Colonel is going to
make a fern bed around his summer house.