"Why don't you bring him to the table, Reub?" his sister called to him.
"Oh, he says he'd rather not come in, as long as we have company. He says
he isn't dressed for dinner; left his spike-tail in the city."
The young man laughed, and his sister with him.
VIII
Young Camp carried out the plate of victuals to the tramp, and Mrs. Makely
said to his mother: "I suppose you would make the tramp do some sort of
work to earn his breakfast on week-days?"
"Not always," Mrs. Camp replied. "Do the boarders at the hotel always work
to earn their breakfast?"
"No, certainly not," said Mrs. Makely, with the sharpness of offence. "But
they always pay for it."
"I don't think that paying for a thing is earning it. Perhaps some one
else earned the money that pays for it. But I believe there is too much
work in the world. If I were to live my life over again, I should not work
half so hard. My husband and I took this place when we were young married
people, and began working to pay for it. We wanted to feel that it was
ours, that we owned it, and that our children should own it afterward. We
both worked all day long like slaves, and many a moonlight night we were
up till morning, almost, gathering the stones from our fields and burying
them in deep graves that we had dug for them.
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