Page:Saunders - Beautiful Joe, 1893.djvu/264

Rh in stores and offices, and growing pale and sickly. It would have broken my heart if Harry had taken to city ways. I had a plain talk with your uncle when I married him, and said, 'Now my boy's only a baby, and I want him to be brought up so that he will love country life. How are we going to manage it?'

"Your uncle looked at me with a sly twinkle in his eye, and said I was a pretty fair specimen of a country girl, suppose we brought up Harry the way I'd been brought up. I knew he was only joking, yet I got quite excited. 'Yes,' I said, 'Do as my father and mother did. Have a farm about twice as large as you can manage. Don't keep a hired man. Get up at daylight and slave till dark. Never take a holiday. Have the girls do the housework, and take care of the hens, and help pick the fruit, and make the boys tend the colts and the calves, and put all the money they make in the bank. Don't take any papers, for they would waste their time reading them, and it's too far to go to the post office oftener than once a week; and'—but, I don't remember the rest of what I said. Anyway your uncle burst into a roar of laughter. 'Hattie,' he said, 'my farm's too big. I'm going to sell some of it and enjoy myself a little more.' That very week he sold fifty acres, and he hired an extra man, and got me a good girl, and twice a week he left his work in the afternoon, and took me for a drive. Harry held the reins in his tiny fingers, and John told him that Dolly, the old mare we were driving, should be called his, and the very next horse he bought should be called his too, and he should name it and have it for his own; and he would give him five sheep, and he should have his own bank book, and keep his accounts; and Harry understood, mere baby though he was, and from that day