Silence yet.  Babbie swallowed hard: 

“I—­I don’t think I like eccen-tricks, Uncle Jed,” she faltered.

Not a word.  Then Jed, stooping to pick up a piece of wood from the pile of cut stock beside the lathe, was conscious of a little sniff.  He looked up.  His small visitor’s lip was quivering and two big tears were just ready to overflow her lower lashes.

“Eh? . . .  Mercy sakes alive!” he exclaimed.  “Why, what’s the matter?”

The lip quivered still more.  “I—­I don’t like to have you not speak to me,” sobbed Babbie.  “You—­you never did it so—­so long before.”

That appeal was sufficient.  Away, for the time, went Jed’s pessimism and his hopeless musings.  He forgot that he was a fool, the “town crank,” and of no use in the world.  He forgot his own heartbreak, chagrin and disappointment.  A moment later Babbie was on his knee, hiding her emotion in the front of his jacket, and he was trying his best to soothe her with characteristic Winslow nonsense.

“You mustn’t mind me, Babbie,” he declared.  “My—­my head ain’t workin’ just right to-day, seems so.  I shouldn’t wonder if—­if I wound it too tight, or somethin’ like that.”

Babbie’s tear-stained face emerged from the jacket front.

“Wound your head too tight, Uncle Jed?” she cried.

“Ye-es, yes.  I was kind of extra absent-minded yesterday and I thought I wound the clock, but I couldn’t have done that ’cause the clock’s stopped.  Yet I know I wound somethin’ and it’s just as liable to have been my head as anything else.  You listen just back of my starboard ear there and see if I’m tickin’ reg’lar.”

The balance of the conversation between the two was of a distinctly personal nature.

“You see, Uncle Jed,” said Barbara, as she jumped from his knee preparatory to running off to school, “I don’t like you to do eccen-tricks and not talk to me.  I don’t like it at all and neither does Petunia.  You won’t do any more—­not for so long at a time, will you, Uncle Jed?”

Jed sighed.  “I’ll try not to,” he said, soberly.

She nodded.  “Of course,” she observed, “we shan’t mind you doing a few, because you can’t help that.  But you mustn’t sit still and not pay attention when we talk for ever and ever so long.  I—­I don’t know precactly what I and Petunia would do if you wouldn’t talk to us, Uncle Jed.”

“Don’t, eh?  Humph!  I presume likely you’d get along pretty well.  I ain’t much account.”

Barbara looked at him in horrified surprise.

“Oh, Uncle Jed!” she cried, “you mustn’t talk so!  You mustn’t!  Why—­why, you’re the bestest man there is.  And there isn’t anybody in Orham can make windmills the way you can.  I asked Teacher if there was and she said no.  So there!  And you’re a great cons’lation to all our family,” she added, solemnly.  “We just couldn’t ever—­ever do without you.”