“Yes.”

“Goodness! —­ What’s going to be sown here?”

“Wheat.”

“And all this work is just to make the ground soft for the seeds!”

“Why wouldn’t it do just as well to make holes in the ground and put the seeds in?” said Miss Cadwallader; —­ “without taking so much trouble?”

“It is not merely to make the ground soft,” said Winthrop gravely, while Elizabeth’s bright eye glanced at him to mark his behaviour.  “The soil might be broken without being so thoroughly turned.  If you see, Miss Elizabeth, —­ the slice taken off by the share is laid bottom upwards.”

“I see —­ well, what is that for?”

“To give it the benefit of the air.”

“The benefit of the air! —­”

“The air has a sort of enriching and quickening influence upon the soil; —­ if the land has time and chance, it can get back from the air a great deal of what it lost in the growing of crops.”

“The soil loses, then?”

“Certainly; it loses a great deal to some crops.”

“What, for instance?”

“Wheat is a great feeder,” said Winthrop; “so is Indian corn.”

“By its being ‘a great feeder’, you mean that it takes a great deal of the nourishing quality of the soil?”

“Yes.”

“How many things I do not know!” said Elizabeth wistfully.

In the little pause which ensued, Winifred took her chance to say,

“Here’s your dinner, Governor.”

“Then when the ground is ploughed, is there anything else to be done before it is ready for the wheat?”

“Only harrowing.”

Elizabeth mused a little while.

“And how much will the wheat be worth, Winthrop, from all this field?”

“Perhaps two hundred dollars; or two hundred and fifty.”

“Two hundred and fifty. —­ And then the expenses are something.”

“Less to us,” said Winthrop, “because we do so much of the labour ourselves.”

“Here’s your dinner, Winthrop,” said Winifred; —­ “shall I set it under the tree?”

“Yes —­ no, Winifred, —­ you may leave it here.”

“Then stop and eat it now, Governor, won’t you? —­ don’t wait any longer.”

He gave his little sister a look and a little smile, that told of an entirely other page of his life, folded in with the ploughing experience; a word and look very different from any he had given his questioners.  Other indications Elizabeth’s eye had caught under ‘the tree,’ —­ a single large beech tree which stood by the fence some distance off.  Two or three books lay there.

“Do you find time for reading here in the midst of your ploughing, Mr. Winthrop?”

“Not much —­ sometimes a little in the noon-spell,” he answered, colouring slightly.

They left him and walked on to visit Rufus.  Elizabeth led near enough to the tree to make sure, what her keen eye knew pretty well already, that one of the books was the very identical old brown-covered Greek and Latin dictionary that she had seen in the boat.  She passed on and stood silent by Rufus’s plough.