One of the blissful possessions of the man of mature years is the self-control which spares its possessor the necessity of consuming time and vitality in profitless excitement. Farmer Hayn, returning to his native village, had a great deal more on his mind than Phil when that youth preceded him a few days before. It is true that Phil was bemoaning what he believed to be the loss of a sweetheart, but the old man’s thoughts were equally full of the possible gain of a daughter,—an earthly possession he had longed for through many years but been denied. He had also a large and promising land-speculation to engage his thoughts,—a speculation which, apparently, would bring the family more gain in a year than three generations of Hayns had accumulated in a century. He was planning more enjoyments for his gray-haired, somewhat wrinkled old wife, should the Improvement Company’s plans succeed, than any happy youth ever devised for his bride, and he knew exactly how they would affect the good woman,—a privilege which is frequently denied the newly-made husband.

And yet his mind and countenance were as serene and undisturbed as if he were merely looking forward to the peaceable humdrum of a farmer’s winter. The appearance of fields and forests past which the train hurried him did not depress him as they did his son; a shabby farm-house merely made him thank heaven that his own was more sightly and comfortable; a bit of pine-barren or scrub-oak reminded him, to his great satisfaction, that his own woodland could be trusted to pay some profit, to say nothing of taxes and interest. Even swampy lowlands caused his heart to warm with pride that his strong arm and stronger will had transformed similar bogs into ground more fertile than some to which nature had been kinder.

Nor did he lose his serenity when the natives came down on him, like a famished horde of locusts, and demanded news of what was going on in the city. He cheerfully told them nearly everything he knew, and parried undesirable questions without losing his temper. He pointed with pride to his sub-soil plough and his wife’s new bread-pan, and told how the lenses in his new spectacles had been made to equalize the strength of his eyes, instead of being both alike, as in the glasses at the village stores. He had heard all the great preachers, had a good square talk with the commission-merchant to whom most Haynton farm-products went, seen everything that the newspapers advertised as wonderfully cheap, bought some seed oats larger than any ever seen in Haynton, got a Sunday hat which was neither too large nor too small, too young nor too old, and added to the family collection of pictures a photograph of the Washington monument and an engraving of the “Death of President Garfield.”

Haynton and its environs simply quivered with excitement over all the news and personal property which the farmer brought back; but it experienced deeper thrills when the old man told his neighbors that he knew of a plan by which they might get rid of their ridge-land for an amount of money the mere interest of which would bring them more profit than the crops coaxed from that thin soil. The plan would benefit them still more should the buyer’s project succeed, for a lot of cottagers would make a brisk cash market for the vegetables which Haynton ground produced so easily, and which Haynton farmers moaned over because they could not at present sell the surplus at any price, much less at the figures which their agricultural newspapers told them were to be obtained in large cities.

Would they take ten dollars per acre for their ridge-land, the money to be forfeited unless the remainder of two hundred per acre were paid within a year? Would they? Well, they consented with such alacrity that the farmer soon had to write to New York for more currency. Before Thanksgiving Day the Haynton Bay Improvement Company controlled a full mile of shore front, and there was more money in circulation in the village than could be remembered except by the oldest inhabitant, who was reminded of the good old times when in 1813 a privateer, built and manned in Haynton’s little bay, had carried a rich prize into New York and come home to spend the proceeds. Small mortgages were paid off, dingy houses appeared in new suits of paint, several mothers in Israel bought new Sunday dresses, two or three farmers gave their old horses and some money for better ones, the aisle of one church was carpeted and another church obtained the bell that for years had been longed for, a veteran pastor had fifty dollars added to his salary of four hundred a year, and got the money, too, several families began to buy parlor-organs, on the instalment plan, one farmer indulged in the previously unheard-of extravagance of taking his family, consisting of his wife and himself, to New York to spend the winter, and another dedicated his newly-found money and his winter-enforced leisure to the reprehensible work of drinking himself to death.

“An’ it’s all on account of a gal,” farmer Hayn would remark to his wife whenever he heard of any new movement that could be traced to the ease of the local money market. “If our Phil hadn’t got that Tramlay gal on the brain last summer, he wouldn’t have gone to New York to visit; then I wouldn’t have gone to look for him, and the Improvement Company wouldn’t have been got up, an’ Phil wouldn’t have hatched the brilliant idee of buyin’—what did he call ’em?—oh, yes; options—buyin’ options on the rest of the ridge, an’ there would have been no refreshin’ shower of greenbacks fallin’ like the rain from heaven on the just an’ unjust alike. It reminds me of the muss that folks got into in the old country over that woman Helen, whose last name I never could find out. You remember it?—’twas in the book that young minister we had on trial, an’ didn’t exactly like, left at our house. It’s just another such case, only a good deal more proper, this not bein’ a heathen land. All on account of a gal!”

“If it is,” Mrs. Hayn replied on one occasion, as she took her hands from the dough she was kneading, “an’ it certainly looks as if it was, don’t you think it might be only fair to allude to her more respectful? I don’t like to hear a young woman that our Phil’s likely to marry spoke of as just ‘that Tramlay gal.’”

“S’pose, then, I mention her as your daughter-in-law? But ain’t it odd that all the changes that’s come to pass in the last month or two wouldn’t have happened at all if it hadn’t been for Phil’s bein’ smitten by that gal? As the Scripture says, ‘Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.’ For ‘fire’ read ‘spark,’ or sparkin’, an’ the text——”

“Reuben!” exclaimed Mrs. Hayn, “don’t take liberties with the Word.”

“It ain’t no liberty,” said the old man. “Like enough it’ll read ‘spark’ in the Revised Edition.”

“Then wait till it does, or until you’re one of the revisers,” said the wife.

“All right; mebbe it would be as well,” the husband admitted. “Meanwhile, I don’t mind turnin’ it off an’ comparin’ it with another text: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.’ The startin’ up of Haynton an’ of Phil’s attachment is a good deal like——”

“I don’t know that that’s exactly reverent, either,” said Mrs. Hayn, “considerin’ what follers in the Book. An’ what’s goin’ on in the neighborhood don’t interest me as much as what’s goin’ on in my own family. I’d like to know when things is comin’ to a head. Phil ain’t married, nor even engaged, that we know of; there ain’t no lots bein’ sold by the company, or if there are we don’t hear about it.”

“An’ there’s never any bread bein’ baked while you’re kneadin’ the dough, old lady. You remember the passage, ‘first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear’? Mustn’t look for fruit in blossomin’-time: even Jesus didn’t find that when he looked for it on a fig-tree ahead of time, you know.”

“‘Pears to me you run to Scripture more than usual this mornin’,” said Mrs. Hayn, after putting her pans of dough into the oven. “What’s started you?”

“Oh, only a little kind of awakenin’, I s’pose,” said the old man. “I can’t keep my mind off of what’s goin’ on right under my eyes, an’ it’s so unlike what anybody would have expected that I can’t help goin’ behind the returns, as they used to say in politics. An’ when I do that there’s only one way of seein’ ’em, an’ I’m glad I’ve got the eyes to see ’em in that light.”

“So am I,” said Mrs. Hayn, gently but successfully putting a floury impression of four fingers and a thumb on her husband’s head. “I s’pose it’s ’cause I’m so tired of waitin’ that I don’t look at things just as you do. ’Pears to me there’s nothin’ that comes up, an’ that our hearts get set on, but what we’ve got to wait for. It gets to be awful tiresome, after you’ve been at it thirty or forty years. I think Phil might hurry up matters a little.”

“Mebbe ’tisn’t Phil’s fault,” suggested the farmer.

“Well,” said Mrs. Hayn, with a flash behind her glasses, “I don’t see why any gal should keep that boy a-waitin’, if that’s what you mean.”

“Don’t, eh?” drawled the old man, with a queer smile and a quizzical look. “Well, I s’pose he is a good deal more takin’ than his father was.”

“No such thing,” said the old lady.

“Much obliged: I’m a good deal too polite to contradict,—when you’re so much in earnest, you know,” the old man replied. “But if it’s so, what’s the reason that you kept him waitin’?”

“Why, I—it was—you see, I—’twas—the way of it was—sho!” And Mrs. Hayn suddenly noticed that a potted geranium in the kitchen window needed a dead leaf removed from its base.

“Yes,” said her husband, following her with his eyes. “An’ I suppose that’s just about what Phil’s gal would say, if any one was to ask her. But the longer you waited the surer I was of you, wasn’t I?”

“Oh, don’t ask questions when you know the answer as well as I do,” said the old lady. “I want to see things come to a head; that’s all.”

“They’ll come; they’ll come,” said the old man. “It’s tryin’ to wait, I know, seein’ I’m doin’ some of the waitin’ myself; but ‘the tryin’ of your faith worketh patience,’ an’ ‘let patience have her perfect work,’ you remember.”

“More Scripture!” sighed the wife. “You’re gettin’ through a powerful sight of New Testament this mornin’, Reuben, an’ I s’pose I deserve it, seein’ the way I feel like fightin’ it. But s’pose this company speculation don’t come to anythin’? then Phil’ll be a good deal wuss off than he is now, won’t he? You remember the awful trouble Deacon Trewk got into by bein’ the head of that new-fangled stump-and-stone-puller company, that didn’t pull any to speak of. Everybody came down on him, an’ called him all sorts of names, an’ said he’d lied to ’em, an’ they would go to the poor-house because of the money they’d put in it on his advice, an’——”

“Phil won’t have any such trouble,” said the farmer, “for nobody took stock on his advice. Tramlay got up the company, before we knew anythin’ about it, an’ all the puffin’ of the land was done by him. Besides, there’s nobody in it that’ll suffer much, even if things come to the wust. Except one or two dummies,—clerks of Tramlay’s,—who were let in for a share or two, just to make up a Board of Directors to the legal size, what shares ain’t held by Phil and Tramlay an’ that feller Marge belongs to a gal.”

“What? Lucia?”

“No, no,—another gal: mebbe I ought to call her a woman, seein’ she’s putty well along, although mighty handsome an’ smart. Her name’s Dinon, an’ Tramlay joked Phil about her once or twice, makin’ out she was struck by him, but of course that’s all nonsense. She’s rich, an’ got money to invest every once in a while, an’ Tramlay put her up to this little operation.”

“You’re sure she ain’t interested in Phil?” asked Mrs. Hayn. “I’ve seen no end of trouble made between young folks by gals that’s old enough to know their own minds an’ smart enough to use ’em.”

“For goodness’ sake, Lou Ann!” exclaimed the old farmer. “To hear you talk, anybody would s’pose that in the big city of New York, where over a million people live and a million more come in from diff’rent places every week, there wasn’t any young man for folks to get interested in but our Phil. Reelly, old lady, I’m beginnin’ to be troubled about you; that sort of feelin’ that’s croppin’ out all the time in you makes me afeard that you’ve got a kind o’ pride that’s got to have a fall,—a pride in our son, settin’ him above all other mortal bein’s, so far as anythin’s concerned that can make a young man interestin’.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hayn, after apparently thinking the matter over, “if it’s so I reckon it’ll have to stay so. I don’t b’lieve there’s any hope of forgiveness for anythin’ if heaven’s goin’ to hold an old woman to account for seein’ all the good there is in her first-born. I hain’t been down to York myself, but some of York’s young sprigs have been down here, one time an’ another, an’ if they’re fair samples of the hull lot, I should think a sight of our Phil would be to all the city gals like the shadder of a great rock in a weary land.”

“Who’s a-droppin’ into Scripture now?” asked the old farmer, moving to where he could look his wife full in the face.

“Scripture ain’t a bit too strong to use freely about our Phil,—my Phil,” said the old woman, pushing her spectacles to the top of her head and beginning to walk the kitchen floor. “All the hopin’, an’ fearin’, an’ waitin’, an’ nursin’, an’ teachin’, an’ thinkin’, an’ prayin’, that that boy has cost comes hurryin’ into my mind when I think about him. If there’s anythin’ he ought to be an’ isn’t, I don’t see what it is, an’ I can’t see where his mother’s to blame for it. Whatever good there is in me I’ve tried to put into him, an’ whatever I was lackin’ in I’ve tried to get for him elsewhere. You’ve been to him ev’rythin’ a father should, an’ he never could have got along without you. You’ve been lots to him that I never could be, he bein’ a boy, an’ I never cease thankin’ heaven for it; but whenever my mind gets on a strain about him I kind o’ get us mixed up, an’ feel as if ’twas me instead of him that was takin’ whatever happened, an’ the longer it lasts the less I can think of him any other way. There!”

The old farmer rose to his feet while this speech was under way; then he removed his hat, which he seldom did after coming into the house, unless reminded. When his wife concluded, he took both her hands and dropped upon his knees; he had often done it before,—years before, when overcome by her young beauty,—but never before had he done it with so much of reverence.