The Able McLaughlins
them, with "holes." For an encore he would show his appreciative audience how the head of each family mentioned "asked the blessing," always politely and stubbornly refusing to imitate the master of the house in which the fun was going on—at least until the master had retired.
Between the visits of the ragged lairds and their offspring, Wully got so much sleep that on the fourth day he announced himself able to help with the fall plowing. His mother refused to have such a suggestion considered, and they compromised on his digging carrots in the garden. At that task she found him doggedly working away after an hour, white and trembling. For a week he recovered from the fever that came on, sleeping by day and by night. The twelfth day he was so well that he rode to look over the "eighty" his father had bought for him with the two hundred dollars that had accrued to him during the fourteen months he lay in prison, trying to carve enough wooden combs to earn what would keep him from starving. His father explained that he might have brought land further on at a dollar and a half an acre. But this was the choice bit of land, and, moreover, it joined the home farm. And this bit of ground, rising just here was obviously the place for the house to be built. Wully smiled indulgently at the idea of his building a house. But he wasn't to smile about it, his father protested. Indeed, they would some way get an acre broken this fall yet in time to plant maple seed, and pop-
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