The Story of a Country Town. E. W. Howe

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      “She owns the farm, though Biggs pretends to own it,” Big Adam went on, “but, while they do not agree in this, they agree that Big Adam hasn’t enough to do, and is very lazy, and between them I have a great deal of trouble. I do all the work that is done here, and though you may think from looking around that I am not kept very busy, I am. There are four hundred acres here, and they expect me to keep it in a high state of cultivation. You see how well I succeed; it’s the worst-looking place on earth.”

      I began to understand him better, and said it looked very well when I drove up.

      “May be it does—from the road, but I haven’t been out there for a year to see. I am kept too busy. But if you stay here long I’ll take you out into the field, and show you weeds higher than your head. Instead of spending the money to mend the stables and fences, they buy more land with it, to give Big Adam something to do; for they are always saying that I am fat from idleness. I am fat, but not from idleness. I haven’t had time this spring to comb my hair. Look at it.”

      He took off the Λ-shaped hat, and held his head down for me to see. It reminded me of the brush heaps in which we found rabbits at home, and I wished Jo had come along; he would have been delighted to shingle it.

      “But you go into the house,” he said, putting on his hat again, and, taking up the fork he had laid down to hunt a stall for my horses: “you’ll hear enough of lazy Adam in there. They’ll tell you I’m lazy and shiftless, because I can’t do the work of a dozen men; and they’ll tell you I am surly, because I can’t cheerfully go ahead and do all they ask me to. A fine opinion of Big Adam you’ll have when you go away; but I ask you to notice while you are here if Big Adam is not always at work: and Agnes will tell you—she is the only one among them who pretends to tell the truth—that she has never seen me idle. But go on into the house; I am not allowed to talk to strangers.”

      Accepting this suggestion, I went through a gate which was torn off its hinges and lying flat in the path, and, walking up the steps, I knocked timidly at the front door. While waiting for some one to answer my rap, I noticed a door-plate hanging on one screw, and, careening my head around, read “Lytle Biggs.” I then understood why his neighbors called him Little Biggs—it was his name.

      I hadn’t time to congratulate myself on this discovery, for just then the door-plate flew in, and Agnes stood before me. Although she was friendly to me as usual there was a constraint in her manner that I could not understand, and as she led the way in she looked as though she was expecting the house to blow up.

      “My uncle is away,” she said, confusedly, after we were seated in a room opening off from the hall where I had entered, “but we expect him home to-night. My mother is not well, and demands a great deal of care, or I should have come down to the gate to meet you when you drove up.”

      She was so ill at ease that I hurried to explain my errand, and I thought she was greatly relieved to know I had not come on a visit.

      “I shall be ready in the morning at any time you are,” she said; and I wondered she could leave her mother, for I had been fearing that perhaps I should have to go back without her.

      There was a great romp and noise in the room above the one in which we sat, and she looked out through the door leading into the hall as if half expecting to see somebody come tumbling down the stairs.

      “My uncle’s children,” she said, seeing I wondered at the noise. “He has eight.”

      I wondered she had not told of them before, and then I remembered that she seldom talked of her uncle’s family or of her mother.

      “How are they all?” I inquired, thinking I must say something.

      There was a great crash in the room overhead and a cry of pain, and Agnes went quickly to the door to listen. Being convinced that one of them had fallen over a chair, she came back, and replied to my question.

      “Very noisy,” she said, half laughingly. “I fear they will annoy you; it is so quiet at your house, and there is so much confusion here.”