Sousa and Mrs. Shuman-Hienze and the Star-Spangled Banner on a brass band in your own front parlor!" I exclaimed. "I didn't know you was fond of music, Isabel."
"I don't know that I am fond of it either," she says, "but some of the records are people talkin'. I thought I wouldn't hear the swamp so loud in the spring, nor the crickets in the fall, nor the wind in winter, if I could listen to somebody talkin', when I sit down after the work is done. I thought it might be kind of company; but I don't know, perhaps it wouldn't. It's only a thing, after all. I haven't decided on it yet."
I left Isabel ten or fifteen minutes later. I pondered on her a good deal the four miles back to town, and when I got to where I was puttin' up, I asked some questions. They told me that Isabel Janse never came to any of the functions in the town. And she didn't attend any church, far as they knew. The old Janse horse was going pretty lame now, and 'twas all he could do, they guessed, to haul down the corn every fall to Hobb's mill on the turnpike.
Nellie and I were headed for Vermont that spring. We have a big territory in New Hampshire, where we've got lots of friends, too, and it was two years before we got back to Massachusetts again. In all that time I didn't hear a
