His face, this morning, wore a troubled look, which Mrs. Leslie was quick to notice, but she had learned that, in dealing with Jim, she must use very much the same tactics that one uses in trying to tame some little wild creature of the woods—a sudden attack, or even approach, scared him off effectually; and although now he no longer ran, literally, as he had done at first, he would take refuge in silence, or an awkward changing of the subject.
She had stopped asking him to take meals with them, when she saw how it distressed him. He was painfully conscious of his want of training, and shrank from exposing it, and he was shrewd enough to know that there is no surer test of “manners” than behavior at the table.
But the evening visits, begun with the making of the gardens, and the reading and singing lessons, she had managed to have continued after the gardens were frostbitten, and the early nightfall made the evenings long. Yet even about this she had been obliged to exercise a great deal of tact and care. Jim had announced that the lessons were to end the moment there was no more work for him to do, and she knew that he meant what he said, so, after thinking a good deal, she appealed to Mr. Leslie for help.
“You don’t happen to want kindling-wood just now, perhaps?” he asked, after thinking a little.
“Don’t I?” she replied. “Why, we _always_ want kindling-wood! I believe that fair kitchen-maid could burn ‘the full of the cellar,’ as she would put it, in a week, if she could get that much to burn.”
“Oh, well then,” said Mr. Leslie, cheerfully, “It’s all right. I happen to know where I can get a wagon load of pine logs and stumps, in comparison with which a ram’s horn is a ruler! I should think half a stump, or one log, an evening might be considered a fair allowance, and you shall have them before the gardens are done for, to make sure. You can explain to your muscular scholar that, by having a few days’ allowance chopped at a time, the reckless maiden can be kept within bounds. But Jim will have my sympathy when he comes to those stumps!”
“He will like it all the better for being so hard, I do believe,” replied Mrs. Leslie, and this proved to be true. When Jim had wrestled for half an hour with a stump which looked like a collection of buffaloes’ heads, he sat down to his lesson with calm satisfaction; no one could say that he had not earned it.