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My father turned about, and, seeing my mother, gave his sniff that prefaced a jocular remark and said he:

"I think you'd better be glad that the boy can baptise sheep instead of mortals."

My mother stiffened under the sunshade, held it up rigidly over her head instead of letting it make a pretty circle behind her head and shoulders. She walked sadly back to the farm and wrote a letter straightway to her minister, asking him his views on sheep-farming for a young man. The parson wrote back that sheep-farming was a lazy life.

My father was a queer old fellow. He was a determined enough man, but very "jack easy" as the word is. He would dismiss things with a "Pshaw—don't worry me," just when the looker-on expected him to fight to the end for his own view, would give his shoulders a dismissing shrug and retire to the library to read his "Don Quixote" in Spanish, with his feet on the mantelpiece.

When this letter arrived my mother handed it to him and he read it with eyes widening and widening, held it in a trembling hand and bellowed out: