Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/252

248 were kept up to the mark for milk and butter and that the hogs were properly fattened to the important end of being turned into good bacon. He respected and admired his father, but was always awkward and uneasy in his presence, feeling confident that the old man was finding something about him to cause extreme amusement.

The relations who occasionally visited at Mill House as a rule took very little notice of Spottswood. Some of them even made him feel that they regarded him as the man-of-all-work on the farm, whose business it was to see that their trunks got hauled over from the Court House. The one Taylor he had always loved and felt easy with had been his brother Tom. Tom had been an ideal big brother, kindly and friendly, never twitting him with being slow-witted. Spottswood was only a little boy when his brother went off to be an artist but he remembered with clearness his grief at his leaving home and then, when he was seventeen and the news came of Tom's death in New York, his poignant though silent suffering had left a mark on the shy, sullen boy.

He would have been glad to be certain that the little girl was his niece, but whether she was his brother's child or not she was a clever little