If there was ever a more curious meal in Dearborn County than that first breakfast of ours in the barn, I never heard of it.

The big table was among the things saved from the living-room, and Esther spread it again with the cloth which had been in use on the previous evening. There was the stain of the tea which the Underwood girl had spilled in the excitement of the supper’s rough interruption; there were other marks of calamity upon it as well—the smudge of cinders, for one thing, and a general diffused effect of smokiness. But it was the only table-cloth we had. The dishes, too, were a queer lot, representing two or three sets of widely different patterns and value, other portions of which we should never see again.

When it was announced that breakfast was ready, Abner took his accustomed arm-chair at the head of the table. He only half turned his head toward Hagadorn and said in formal tones, over his shoulder, “Won’t you draw up and have some breakfast?”

Jee was still sitting where he had planted himself two hours or so before. He still wore his round cap, with the tabs tied down over his ears. In addition to his overcoat, some one—probably his daughter—had wrapped a shawl about his thin shoulders. The boots had not come in, as yet, from the stove, and the blanket was drawn up over his stockinged feet to the knees. From time to time his lips moved, as if he were reciting Scripture texts to himself, but so far as I knew, he had said nothing to any one. His cough seemed rather worse than better.

“Yes, come, father!” Esther added to the farmer’s invitation, and drew a chair back for him two plates away from Abner. Thus adjured he rose and hobbled stiffly over to the place indicated, bringing his foot-blanket with him. Esther stooped to arrange this for him and then seated herself next the host.

“You see, I’m going to sit beside you, Mr. Beech,” she said, with a wan little smile.

“Glad to have you,” remarked Abner, gravely.

The Underwood girl brought in a first plate of buckwheat cakes, set it down in front of Abner, and took her seat opposite Hagadorn and next to me. There remained three vacant places, down at the foot of the table, and though we all began eating without comment, everybody continually encountered some other’s glance straying significantly toward these empty seats. Janey Wilcox, very straight and with an uppish air, came in with another plate of cakes and marched out again in tell-tale silence.

“Hurley! Come along in here an’ git your breakfast!”

The farmer fairly roared out this command, then added in a lower, apologetic tone: “I ’spec’ the women-folks’ve got their hands full with that broken-down old stove.”

We all looked toward the point, half-way down the central barn-floor, where the democrat wagon, drawn crosswise, served to divide our improvised living-room and kitchen. Through the wheels, and under its uplifted pole, we could vaguely discern two petticoated figures at the extreme other end, moving about the stove, the pipe of which was carried up and out through a little window above the door. Then Hurley appeared, ducking his head under the wagon-pole.

“I’m aitin’ out here, convanient to the stove,” he shouted from this dividing-line.

“No, come and take your proper place!” bawled back the farmer, and Hurley had nothing to do but obey. He advanced with obvious reluctance, and halted at the foot of the table, eyeing with awkward indecision the three vacant chairs. One was M’rye’s; the others would place him either next to the hated cooper or diagonally opposite, where he must look at him all the while.

“Sure, I’m better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling tone; but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman sank abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed the Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned afterward that M’rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sapheaded tribe.”

Meanwhile conversation languished.

With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted long enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to the necessities of the occasion. “M’rye says,” she declaimed, coldly, looking the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes are sour she can’t help it. We saved what was left over of the batter, but the Graham flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that stalked out again.

Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on any one’s part that the cakes were not sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as an opening for talk.

“‘Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort at amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin’ to bake the cakes, on account............