The Abilities of Mrs. Ransford

Joan was smiling happily, watching the waging of a droll little farmyard warfare. Just now her life was running very smoothly, and the shadows of memory were steadily receding. She had almost forgotten the few unpleasant moments when she had first beheld the repellent ugliness of Devil's Hill nearly a week ago. Since then nothing had occurred to raise fresh alarm, and memory, with that pleasant knack inspired of perfect physical health, had gently mellowed and lost something of its power to disturb.

It was a curious scene. The farm was still, so still, in the glowing afternoon heat. The cattle were out in the pastures filling themselves with the succulent grass and dozing the long daylight hours away. The "hired" man was out with the team, breaking a new patch of prairie land in the interim between the haying and harvesting. The hogs were gently snuffling in their pens, and a few hens and cockerels were amiably flirting whilst scratching about amongst the barn litter in that busy, inconsequent manner so suggestive to the human mind of effort for the sheer delight of being busy.

It was a scene such as she had often dreamed of, and something which very nearly approached her ideal.

Here, in one corner of the yard, where she stood, sun-bonneted to shelter her face from the burning attentions of the summer sun, leaning idly against a water barrel standing at the corner of the barn, she watched the farmyard comedy which was rapidly threatening to disturb the general peace. A large hen with a late-hatched brood of chicks, whose colors suggested the polygamous conditions under which her matrimonial affairs were carried on, with feathers ruffled and comb flaming, with head lowered and beak agape, was angrily defying an absurd-looking pig which had scarcely passed its sucking age.