Life on the whole was very happy.  There were bad days, of course; days when the oil for the stove failed, and all the firewood was wet and declined to burn—or when there was none at all, and Tom and Horrors were away in the paddocks, so that there was nothing for Aileen to do but take the axe and go for some herself.  She developed a queer fondness for using the axe, and preferred it to any other form of exercise; it was so interesting, she said, to see how seldom you could hit twice in the same place!  Days came, too, when, everything went wrong: when cooking was a failure, and ironing only scorched the clothes, and the baker failed to come and the milk turned sour for no apparent reason; and worse days still, when, perhaps, a headache or a bad night made the world go awry, and everything seemed to conspire to irritate; when Garth might be provoking or Tom be so busy in the paddocks as to forget dinner-time, arriving in a leisurely fashion half an hour late. Those were days when sharp words sprang to the lips unbidden, and had to be fought back.  It was sometimes necessary to pray very hard at her quaint little supplication—"Lord, keep me from gettin’ sour!"