By some mischance the book became the success of the season;
it was widely commended as "a gospel of health and sanity" and
Andrew received, in almost every mail, offers from publishers
and magazine editors who wanted to get hold of his next book.
It is almost incredible to what stratagems publishers will
descend to influence an author.  Andrew had written in
"Paradise Regained" of the tramps who visit us, how quaint and
appealing some of them are (let me add, how dirty), and how we
never turn away any one who seems worthy.  Would you believe
that, in the spring after the book was published, a
disreputable-looking vagabond with a knapsack, who turned up
one day, blarneyed Andrew about his book and stayed overnight,
announced himself at breakfast as a leading New York publisher?
He had chosen this ruse in order to make Andrew's acquaintance.

You can imagine that it didn't take long for Andrew to become
spoiled at this rate!  The next year he suddenly disappeared,
leaving only a note on the kitchen table, and tramped all over
the state for six weeks collecting material for a new book.
I had all I could do to keep him from going to New York to
talk to editors and people of that sort.  Envelopes of
newspaper cuttings used to come to him, and he would pore over
them when he ought to have been ploughing corn.  Luckily the
mail man comes along about the middle of the morning when
Andrew is out in the fields, so I used to look over the
letters before he saw them.  After the second book ("Happiness
and Hayseed" it was called) was printed, letters from
publishers got so thick that I used to put them all in the
stove before Andrew saw them--except those from the Decameron
Jones people, which sometimes held checks.  Literary folk used
to turn up now and then to interview Andrew, but generally I
managed to head them off.

But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and
more of a literary man.  He bought a typewriter.  He would
hang over the pigpen noting down adjectives for the sunset
instead of mending the weather vane on the barn which took a
slew so that the north wind came from the southwest.  He hardly
ever looked at the Sears Roebuck catalogues any more, and after
Mr. Decameron came to visit us and suggested that Andrew write
a book of country poems, the man became simply unbearable.

And all the time I was counting eggs and turning out three
meals a day, and running the farm when Andrew got a literary
fit and would go off on some vagabond jaunt to collect
adventures for a new book.  (I wish you could have seen the
state he was in when he came back from these trips, hoboing it
along the roads without any money or a clean sock to his back.
One time he returned with a cough you could hear the other
side of the barn, and I had to nurse him for three weeks.)
When somebody wrote a little booklet about "The Sage of
Redfield" and described me as a "rural Xantippe" and "the
domestic balance-wheel that kept the great writer close to the
homely realities of life" I made up my mind to give Andrew
some of his own medicine.  And that's my story.

                         CHAPTER TWO

It was a fine, crisp morning in fall--October I dare say--and
I was in the kitchen coring apples for apple sauce.  We were
going to have roast pork for dinner with boiled potatoes and what
Andrew calls Vandyke brown gravy.  Andrew had driven over to town
to get some flour and feed and wouldn't be back till noontime.

Being a Monday, Mrs. McNally, the washerwoman, had come over
to take care of the washing.  I remember I was just on my way
out to the wood pile for a few sticks of birch when I heard
wheels turn in at the gate.  There was one of the fattest
white horses I ever saw, and a queer wagon, shaped like a van.
A funny-looking little man with a red beard leaned forward
from the seat and said something.  I didn't hear what it was,
I was looking at that preposterous wagon of his.

It was coloured a pale, robin's-egg blue, and on the side, in
big scarlet letters, was painted:

                        R.  MIFFLIN'S
                    TRAVELLING PARNASSUS
                     GOOD BOOKS FOR SALE
            SHAKESPEARE, CHARLES LAMB, R.  L.  S.
                   HAZLITT, AND ALL OTHERS

Underneath the wagon, in slings, hung what looked like a tent,
together with a lantern, a bucket, and other small things.
The van had a raised skylight on the roof, something like an
old-fashioned trolley car; and from one corner went up a stove
pipe.  At the back was a door with little windows on each side
and a flight of steps leading up to it.

As I stood looking at this queer turnout, the little reddish
man climbed down from in front and stood watching me.  His
face was a comic mixture of pleasant drollery and a sort of
weather-beaten cynicism.  He had a neat little russet beard
and a shabby Norfolk jacket.  His head was very bald.

"Is this where Andrew McGill lives?" he said.

I admitted it.

"But he's away until noon," I added.  "He'll be back then.