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 extra good and Uncle Ezra's great barns were packed to the doors and filled the air about them with exotic fragrance.

There was much pickling, preserving, and canning done in Aunt Eppie's kitchen, for she hated to see anything go to waste. The savory smell of catsup and chili sauce in the making and of vinegar cooking with spices to pickle the pears and peaches streamed out of the door and whetted the appetite of passers-by. It was impossible for Aunt Eppie's family to consume all these bottled delicacies during the winter. Hence her cellar was crowded with the accumulation of many years. Still she insisted on making more each year. When the plenitude of peaches or grapes or cucumbers was so great that it was a human impossibility to can them all, she gave of her surplus to the tenants, grudgingly, yet with a certain Lady Bountiful pleasure in bestowing favors, and always with many admonitions as to the sin of improvidence.

"It's a sin for sech things to go to waste," she would say. "I'm sure I've give away twenty bushel this year if I've give one. An' all the tenants could have 'em jes as plentiful as us if they'd only plant 'em an' tend 'em. I do think it's a shame for folks to live like hawgs from hand to mouth an' never plant a tree ner a bush ner hardly a tater to put in their mouths. Jes look at all these tenant houses! Not a fruit tree ner a berry bush ner hardly as much as a row o' beets an' cabbages! The shiftlessness of some folks is sech that it's a wonder the Lord A'mighty don't send a plague on 'em."

As the weeks went by Jerry began to follow Judith with his eyes and to think about her when she was not in sight. She seemed to have become all at once a much more interesting person than the little black-haired tomboy that he had played and quarreled with ever since he could remember. One October evening when he came up from work and Judith was in the barnyard milking, he lingered about after putting up the horses, pretending to tinker with the harness. It was past the time to go home and he was hungry as a bear; but something held him. Judith got up from the red and white cow and went to the Jersey, the milking stool in one hand, the bucket