HAYNTON ROUSES ITSELF.

One of the blissful possessions of the man of mature years is the self-control which spares its possessor the necessity of consuming time and vitality in profitless excitement. Farmer Hayn, returning to his native village, had a great deal more on his mind than Phil when that youth preceded him a few days before. It is true that Phil was bemoaning what he believed to be the loss of a sweetheart, but the old man’s thoughts were equally full of the possible gain of a daughter,—an earthly possession he had longed for through many years but been denied. He had also a large and promising land-speculation to engage his thoughts,—a speculation which, apparently, would bring the family more gain in a year than three generations of Hayns had accumulated in a century. He was planning more enjoyments for his gray-haired, somewhat wrinkled old wife, should the Improvement Company’s plans succeed, than any happy youth ever devised for his bride, and he knew exactly how they would affect the good woman,—a privilege which is frequently denied the newly-made husband.

And yet his mind and countenance were as serene and undisturbed as if he were merely looking forward{187} to the peaceable humdrum of a farmer’s winter. The appearance of fields and forests past which the train hurried him did not depress him as they did his son; a shabby farm-house merely made him thank heaven that his own was more sightly and comfortable; a bit of pine-barren or scrub-oak reminded him, to his great satisfaction, that his own woodland could be trusted to pay some profit, to say nothing of taxes and interest. Even swampy lowlands caused his heart to warm with pride that his strong arm and stronger will had transformed similar bogs into ground more fertile than some to which nature had been kinder.

Nor did he lose his serenity when the natives came down on him, like a famished horde of locusts, and demanded news of what was going on in the city. He cheerfully told them nearly everything he knew, and parried undesirable questions without losing his temper. He pointed with pride to his sub-soil plough and his wife’s new bread-pan, and told how the lenses in his new spectacles had been made to equalize the strength of his eyes, instead of being both alike, as in the glasses at the village stores. He had heard all the great preachers, had a good square talk with the commission-merchant to whom most Haynton farm-products went, seen everything that the newspapers advertised as wonderfully cheap, bought some seed oats larger than any ever seen in Haynton, got a Sunday hat which was neither too large nor too small, too young nor too old, and added to the family collection of pictures a photograph of the Washington monument and an engraving of the “Death of President Garfield.”{188}

Haynton and its environs simply quivered with excitement over all the news and personal property which the farmer brought back; but it experienced deeper thrills when the old man told his neighbors that he knew of a plan by which they might get rid of their ridge-land for an amount of money the mere interest of which would bring them more profit than the crops coaxed from that thin soil. The plan would benefit them still more should the buyer’s project succeed, for a lot of cottagers would make a brisk cash market for the vegetables which Haynton ground produced so easily, and which Haynton farmers moaned over because they could not at present sell the surplus at any price, much less at the figures which their agricultural newspapers told them were to be obtained in large cities.

Would they take ten dollars per acre for their ridge-land, the money to be forfeited unless the remainder of two hundred per acre were paid within a year? Would they? Well, they consented with such alacrity that the farmer soon had to write to New York for more currency. Before Thanksgiving Day the Haynton Bay Improvement Company controlled a full mile of shore front, and there was more money in circulation in the village than could be remembered except by the oldest inhabitant, who was reminded of the good old times when in 1813 a privateer, built and manned in Haynton’s little bay, had carried a rich prize into New York and come home to spend the proceeds. Small mortgages were paid off, dingy houses appeared in new suits of paint, several mothers in Israel bought new Sunday{189} dresses, two or three farmers gave their old horses and some money for better ones, the aisle of one church was carpeted and another church obtained the bell that for years had been longed for, a veteran pastor had fifty dollars added to his salary of four hundred a year, and got the money, too, several families began to buy parlor-organs, on the instalment plan, one farmer indulged in the previously unheard-of extravagance of taking his family, consisting of his wife and himself, to New York to spend the winter, and another dedicated his newly-found money and his winter-enforced leisure to the reprehensible work of drinking himself to death.

“An’ it’s all on account of a gal,” farmer Hayn would remark to his wife whenever he heard of any new movement that could be traced to the ease of the local money market. “If our Phil hadn’t got that Tramlay gal on the brain last summer, he wouldn’t have gone to New York to visit; then I wouldn’t have gone to look for him, and the Improvement Company wouldn’t have been got up, an’ Phil wouldn’t have hatched the brilliant idee of buyin’—what did he call ’em?—oh, yes; options—buyin’ options on the rest of the ridge, an’ there would have been no refreshin’ shower of greenbacks fallin’ like the rain from heaven on the just an’ unjust alike. It reminds me of the muss that folks got into in the old country over that woman Helen, whose last name I never could find out. You remember it?—’twas in the book that young minister we had on trial, an’ didn’t exactly like, left at our house. It’s just another such case, only a good deal more proper,{190} this not bein’ a heathen land. All on account of a gal!”

“If it is,” Mrs. Hayn replied on one occasion, as she took her hands from the dough she was kneading, “an’ it certainly looks as if it was, don’t you think it might be only fair to allude to her more respectful? I don’t like to hear a young woman that our Phil’s likely to marry spoke of as just ‘that Tramlay gal.’ ”

“S’pose, then, I mention her as your daughter-in-law? But ain’t it odd that all the changes that’s come to pass in the last month or two wouldn’t have happened at all if it hadn’t been for Phil’s bein’ smitten by that gal? As the Scripture says, ‘Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.’ For ‘fire’ read ‘spark,’ or sparkin’, an’ the text——”

“Reuben!” exclaimed Mrs. Hayn, “don’t take liberties with the Word.”

“It ain’t no liberty,” said the old man. “Like enough it’ll read ‘spark’ in the Revised Edition.”

“Then wait till it does, or until you’re one of the revisers,” said the wife.

“All right; mebbe it would be as well,” the husband admitted. “Meanwhile, I don’t mind turnin’ it off an’ comparin’ it with another text: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.’ The startin’ up of Haynton an’ of Phil’s attachment is a good deal like——”

“I don’t know that that’s exactly reverent, either,” said Mrs. Hayn, “considerin’ what follers in the Book. An’ what’s goin’ on in the neighborhood don’t interest me as much as what’s goin’ on in my{191} own family. I’d like to know when things is comin’ to a head. Phil ain’t married, nor even engaged, that we know of; there ain’t no lots bein’ sold by the company, or if there are we don’t hear about it.”

“An’ there’s never any bread bein’ baked while you’re kneadin’ the dough, old lady. You remember the passage, ‘first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear’? Mustn’............