The women waited on the table, not in the sense of changing plates and bringing fresh courses, for all the dinner was before them, but replenishing cups and glasses when they were empty, refilling the vegetable-tureens and bread-plates, cutting the pies and cake and passing them around, and serving out the canned peaches and the custard in small dishes. They were also careful to see that the pickles and preserves were passed to every one.
With most of the men present Elvira was acquainted: they were the patrons of her school, and found time in the midst of eating and general conversation to ask how Johnnie was a-comin' on in his spellin', or if Annie was gettin' along well in her 'rithmetic, adding, "I'll be wantin' her to calkilate interest for me by and by." Bert Mowrer's father inquired about his boy, then added cheerfully, "If he don't behave, lick him,--lick him: that's what I tell every teacher."
Farmer Loper and the engineer fell to discussing how many bushels of wheat to the acre the neighboring farms had produced, and how many this would probably produce, with various comments on the weather and the soil. A little farther down the table a young farmer was telling of the speed made by his brown mare Kitty,--how she passed every team on the road, and that he wouldn't take a hundred and fifty dollars for her; and farther still, two or three were discussing the affairs of an absent neighbor,--how he had bought the Caldwell place, but, not being able to pay for it, had given a mortgage, and hadn't managed the farm very well, had let the interest run behind, they had heard, so there was a prospect of his losing it.
"I guess he won't have to give it up," said one: "the woman that raised his wife has got plenty of money, and if he can't make it, she'll pay for the place and let them live on it. She's helped them several times already. If he wasn't so lazy and shiftless he might have everything in good shape."
But a conversation which was going on at the lower end of the table interested Elvira most of all. It was about birds, including some of her favorites of the woods and fields which she had noticed a great deal in her solitary rides that summer. The principal speaker was a young farmer whom she had never seen before. He seemed to be acquainted with the names and habits of all the birds which lived in that section, besides many which merely passed through it on their way northward every spring and southward every fall.