The first objection Barton read in my face.

“MacGregor is quitting ...  I’m not firing him.”

“All right ...  I’ll take the job.”

Our conference over, we had climbed out to the top of the dam, slid over, and were now standing beneath.  The water galloped down in a snowy cataract of foam, as we topped off our swim with the heavy “shower-bath” that was like a massage in its pummelling.

* * * * *

MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he’d show me the run of things.  Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook....

As the cooking was not all of the “nature” order, but involved preparing food for a horde of people we called “outsiders” who were employed in Barton’s publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread and make tea and coffee....

Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him.  But he could not coerce.  While lecturing about the country it was often, even with him, “eat beefsteaks or starve!”

MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the others—­whose “professionalism” generally bears an unpleasant reek.

MacGregor had sandy, scanty hair, a tiny white shadow of a moustache, kindly, weak eyes, a forehead prematurely wrinkled with minute, horizontal lines.  Burns ... of course ... he knew and quoted every line to me.  And Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel.

* * * * *

In a week I was left in full possession of the nature restaurant.

Barton had been rendered slightly paring and mean, in matters of money,—­by smooth individuals who came to him, glowing with words of what they could effect for him, in this or that project—­individuals who soon decamped, leaving Barton the poorer, except in experience.

In return he had to retrench.  But the retrenchments fell in the place where the penny, not the dollar, lay.

He practised economy on me.  He gave me only ten dollars a week, board and room free, as cook; and also I was to wait on the diners, as well as prepare the meals.

Nevertheless the fault for having two jobs at once thrust on me, rested partly with me:  when he asked me if I was able to do both, I fell into a foolish, boasting mood and said “yes.”

MacGregor figured out my menu for me a week ahead, the day he left:  “Anyhow, you’ll only last a week,” he joked.

The night before the first breakfast I lay awake all night, worrying ... hadn’t I better just sneak away with daylight?... no, I must return to Mt.  Hebron in the fall.  Though all I wanted to return for was to show the school, that, in spite of my spindly legs, I could win my “H” in track athletics.