Andrew Brewster, lying in the dewy grass under the apple-trees, giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung to death by ants.

He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt the indignity of coping with such petty odds.

"For God's sake, if I had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for something ?" he groaned, speaking with his lips close to the earth as if it were a listening ear.

"Why need it all have been over so little?
It's just the little fight for enough to eat and wear that's getting the better of me that was a man, and able to do a man's work in the world.

Now it has come to this! Here I am runnin' away from a woman because she wants me to pay her three dollars, and I am afraid of another woman because--I've been and fooled away a few hundred dollars I had in the savings-bank.