And having made this oracular speech and quaffed the hard limestone water, Jonas hung the clean white gourd from which he had been drinking, in its place against the well-curb, and started back to the field, while Cynthy Ann carried her bucket of water into the kitchen, blaming herself for standing so long talking to Jonas.  To Cynthy everything pleasant had a flavor of sinfulness.

The pail of water was hardly set down in the sink when there came a knock at the door, and Cynthy found standing by it the strapped pantaloons, the “red-top” mustache, the watch-seals, and all the rest that went to make up the new singing-master.  He smiled when he saw her, one of those smiles which are strictly limited to the lower half of the face, and are wholly mechanical, as though certain strings inside were pulled with malice aforethought and the mouth jerked out into a square grin, such as an ingeniously-made automaton might display.

“Is Mr. Anderson in?”

“No, sir; he’s gone to town.”

“Is Mrs. Anderson in?”

And so he entered, and soon got into conversation with the lady of the house, and despite the prejudice which she entertained for mustaches, she soon came to like him.  He smiled so artistically.  He talked so fluently.  He humored all her whims, pitied all her complaints, and staid to dinner, eating her best preserves with a graciousness that made Mrs. Anderson feel how great was his condescension.  For Mr. Humphreys, the singing-master, had looked at the comely face of Julia, and looked over Julia’s shoulders at the broad acres beyond; and he thought that in Clark township he had not met with so fine a landscape, so nice a figure-piece.  And with the quick eye of a man of the world, he had measured Mrs. Anderson, and calculated on the ease with which he might complete the picture to suit his taste.

He staid to supper.  He smiled that same fascinating square smile on Samuel Anderson, treated him as head of the house, talked glibly of farming, and listened better than he talked.  He gave no account of himself, except by way of allusion.  He would begin a sentence thus, “When I was traveling in France with my poor dear mother,” etc., from which Mrs. Anderson gathered that he had been a devoted son, and then he would relate how he had seen something curious “when he was dining at the house of the American minister at Berlin.”  “This hazy air reminds me of my native mountains in Northern New York.”  And then he would allude to his study of music in the Conservatory in Leipsic.  To plain country people in an out-of-the-way Western neighborhood, in 1843, such a man was better than a lyceum full of lectures.  He brought them the odor of foreign travel, the flavor of city, the “otherness” that everybody craves.

[Illustration:  THE HAWK.]