BY OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN

HIGHLAND ANNALS
LUTE AND FURROW
THE MORTAL GODS AND OTHER PLAYS
LORDS AND LOVERS AND OTHER DRAMAS
THE CYCLE’S RIM
THE PATH FLOWER AND OTHER VERSE

With Frederic Peterson

THE FLUTTER OF THE GOLD LEAF AND OTHER PLAYS

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

HIGHLAND ANNALS

HIGHLAND
ANNALS

By
OLIVE
TILFORD
DARGAN

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1925

The first six of these sketches were published in THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. Number seven appeared in THE REVIEWER. The author thanks the editors of these magazines for permission to reprint.

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1924, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY COPYRIGHT, APRIL, 1925, BY THE REVIEWER

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. About Granpap and Trees 3

II. Coretta and Autumn 24

III. Serena and Wild Strawberries 54

IV. Sam 76

V. Evvie: Somewhat Married 107

VI. My Wild-Hog Claim: A Dubious Asset 138

VII. Serena Takes a Boarder 180

VIII. A Proper Funeral 229

HIGHLAND ANNALS

I

ABOUT GRANPAP AND TREES

I

Granpap accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once passed from prose to poetry. My hundred hills became tipped with song, bloom calling to bloom from Three Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from its storehouse across a paltry breadth of sky, in the sun. The great chestnuts leafily defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts. And where the gray rocks pushed through the living emerald of the mountain walls, they too seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world. Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet of centuries, and began another dream--dream of a region that was old to God before Helvellyn rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet’s crest.

In the wake of a Muse so sure of foot, I entered my forest a little stumblingly. The first cabin was Granpap Merlin’s. His welcoming “Howdy” only slightly interrupted his dinner of corn-pone and pickled beans. But Poesy kept at my ear, swiftly picturing me fields like blowing seas; gallant stalks with waving green arms, and tassels flowing, silver, gold, and rose, in the breath of July dawns. With a thrust into memory, she brought up a rock maize-mill of my childhood, left by the Indians in an abandoned cave; and chanted the one magic line of Lanier’s poem. As for beans, I had seen them in blossom, hiding their pinkness under round, hugging leaves, and not even their passage through a brine barrel could convert them into mere pabulum. It was a fitting meal for a mountain seer.

“Did you grow the corn that made the meal that made that pone?” I asked, building Jack’s house in the excitement of getting back to the land.

“It growed itself. I planted it.”

“And you ploughed the field that grew the corn, and so forth?”

“My mule, Tim, ploughed it. I ploughed Tim.”

His face, like the broken corner of a boulder, did not tell me whether he was simply, or contemptuously, laconical.

“This seems rather high for corn land,” I said, in the tone of ownership. He must at least know that I had read the Farmers’ Bulletins.

“Wait till you see it growin’. The corn gets so onhandy big and shady in Hawk Wing Cove, you can see the lightnin’-bugs in thar by daylight. But ’tain’t easy ploughin’. Twenty-five acres of straight up and down.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of that cove. From the head of it one can see seven curves of the river.”

“If you look from the door thar, you can see the top of the ridge ’tween them two peaks.”

I looked.

“It must be glorious to make one’s bread up there.”

“I never made bread up thar but once. I baked hoecakes on a rock one day when Cyn sent me meal and water for my dinner. I hadn’t left her any stove-wood, an’ she had proper spirit, Cyn had,” he added, as if his wife’s memory must be kept clear of blemish. “But thar wa’n’t no glory in it, as I see.”

“I must go there the first thing. I don’t suppose there are any snakes.”

“No, I don’t see more’n two or three rattlers a year now. Not much killin’.”

His voice, like a retired general’s, was bored but tolerant.

“Rattlesnakes? In those pastures of heaven? Did you ever kill one there?”

“One? If they’d been fence-rails I could ’a’ put a mule-proof fence around that field with all I’ve killed in it.”

I looked again at the line of pallid gold just showing between two pointed barriers. It ebbed away, more like a bridge to faith, or some such unsubstantiality, than the trampled ground where man had battled for his overlordship. I would go there, come to-morrow. And I did. But what happens in aerial gardens must have its own chapter and aureole.

II

Granpap’s toleration of me passed into liking very slowly. His stolidity often brought my imagination down as if it had struck a wall; and while I gathered up the pieces, the wall would become human and wonder why I had given such an invidious thrust. Naturally the essence of comradeship eluded us for some time. But finally he understood that my assaults were harmless; that he merely happened to be on the horizon when my enthusiasm was spraying the skies; and I began to see that he was too much a part of Nature to become consciously her note-book. He wore externality as a tree wears its bark, receiving all winds with passionless impartiality; but those winds of change were his breath of life.

One day I asked him if he did not sometimes feel that he would like to live in a city.

“No,” he said, “I have to stay whar thar’s somethin’ happenin’.”

Not an eyelash of me betrayed my glee. The least sign of emotion, and the gates of confidence would be snapped and sealed.

“In a city,” he said, “you don’t have seasons--jest weather.”

In the cabin with him lived his son Sam, Sam’s wife, Coretta, and their children. Once he returned home after a night away, and was much puzzled on learning of their “goin’s-on” in his absence. Cecil having the earache, the father and mother had risen in the dead of night, built a fire, and administered the usual remedy--warm rabbit’s oil poured into the ear. So far granpap understood.

“But how,” said he, “could they think the roosters were crowin’ for daylight when it was only midnight--an’ git breakfast too?”

“But, granpap,” explained Coretta, “we had been asleep for hours, and how could you ’a’ knowed the time, with the night cloudy-gray, an’ no stars, an’ the clock stopped?”

“Kain’t you feel the time?” he asked, in concerned surprise, as if she were pathetically deformed. And later he said to me: “K’rettie kain’t feel the time at all. I hope the little feller ain’t goin’ to take arter her.”

“Cecil? Oh, no! He’s a Merlin. You can count on that. Don’t you like the boy’s name, granpap?”

He slowly cut a twig from the nearest dogwood and peeled it carefully.

“You noticed I never handle his name?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“K’rettie ain’t high-stocked with brains, but she’s got enough fer a woman; an’ she’s not great on housekeepin’, but ’tain’t every man can git hold of a woman like Cyn was. I ain’t got nothin’ agin K’rettie but her namin’ the boy like that. He might as well be a furriner. I counted on his bein’ named Dick,--Richard Merlin,--like my father an’ grandfather, an’ my oldest brother who was killed in the war. But this sissy name, it’s bitterer’n this dogwood. I jest ain’t a-goin’ to say it.”

He cut the twig into inch-long pieces and dropped them into his pocket to be used as a substitute for tobacco.

That afternoon I remembered that I wanted to see Coretta about making me a mattress of new splintered shucks. I did not often seek Coretta. Married at fifteen, at twenty-two she was the mother of four. If she had taken her maternal honors lightly, as a child should, I could have gone happily to and from her presence. But she was determined “to do right by the Lord’s gifts,” and her soft scramble for any crumbs of wisdom that I inadvertently dropped usually hurried my departure to a spot more suitable for meditation, where I could wonder what I had said anyhow. I should have liked to carry off Coretta’s children and free her petunia-blue eyes from clouds; but I remembered that I had once impulsively taken a broom from a child who was struggling to use it, and then found that I could not stay to do the child’s work. I really had to be going. And four children might prove more embarrassing than a broom. Four futures billowing to seas, and my life already pinched for room! No; better the hurried step and remote gaze as I passed.

In the least matter of business, the Unakasian expects to be approached by polite indirection. The more you curve and circle, softly as an Indian in the enemy’s woods, casually as a sparrow hops, the surer you may be of attaining your object. A straight march to the point, and you will find yourself gesturing to empty air, so swiftly will he withdraw from negotiations; so surely your breach of manners will be punished.

In half an hour’s talk with Coretta, I came somewhat hastily to the mattress, and she sat troubled. I could safely begin on my home curve.

“His name is Richard Cecil, isn’t it? Richard is a fine old name. I suppose you’ll call him that when he is older.”

Her surprised eyes swam in the gauze-light of pathos that I had learned to ignore.

“Cecil is good enough for a little boy. But so many famous men have been named Richard.”

“What men?”

“There was Richard Lovelace.”

“What did he do?”

“He wrote poetry.”

“Like you write?”

“Yes--no--not exactly,” I hastened. “And there was Richard Burbage, a great actor.”

“One o’ them movie men?”

“No, he played in great plays--not like you see nowadays. And Richard Lion-Heart, a mighty king. They buried him in that place I showed you the picture of--Westminster Abbey,” I ventured, though I had visions of his death in the arms of Saladin somewhere beyond the Balkans.

She was impressed, and I thrust on.

“And Dick Turpin,--Richard Turpin,--who was afraid of nothing.”

“Did they bury him in the Abbey, too?”

“No, but he died famously. Half of London went to his--er--funeral.”

She was silent a moment, and then said: “I’ll shore fix that bed for you as soon as Sam can shuck out the corn.”

With this grateful stab in my heart I left her; and Katy went with me to relate a story her papa had brought home. She pronounced “papa” as did all the children, like the flower, poppy, with a soft trail at the end, making a dear word more dear. Katy was eleven, the daughter of Sam’s first wife.

When war stretched a hand into the Unakas, and one by one, then dozen by dozen, the young men began to disappear, the people wondered more and more what it was about. As a rule, they were not reached by the daily papers which feed us truth and bathe us in illumination; and Katy’s story showed how they had adapted the chief argument that had sifted to them.

“There was a cripple, and he was a German. He was goin’ over to Briartown, and stopped at a man’s house. The man and woman were gone to the store. The childern were cookin’ some beans for dinner. The cripple ast to stir the beans. An’ he put something into the pot. Some powder or something. The woman come home and the childern told her. The man come home and the woman told him. They took up the dinner and ast the German to set to the table. He took a chair and passed the beans. Nobody took any. Then the man said: ‘Have some beans yerself.’ But the German said he wouldn’t choose any. Then the man got his gun, and said: ‘You will eat them beans or die.’ The German took some of the beans. And in an hour his tongue was swelled out of his head.”

She paused, lifting anxious eyes, to know if I thought the story was true.

“Yes, Katy,” I answered unflinchingly. Could such a climax be chance invention? A mere accident of art?

“Papa says it is true, for he found a cripple on the Briartown road one day an’ let him ride his horse for a mile. He couldn’t speak plain like papa, an’ he knows it was that German, but he don’t see how Abraham Ludd and Jim Dow let him git by.”

She was speaking of two neighbor boys in the service. One had risen to a captaincy, the other had been decorated.

“Jim Dow----”

“Captain Dow, Katy,” said I.

“He don’t write to Nellie Ludd any more.”

“Did Nellie tell you?”

“No, but she’s quit goin’ to the post-office. She’s ashamed to ast an’ git nothin’ every time.”

I wondered if that was why Nellie flitted so ghost-like about the hills, as difficult to capture as a bird fearing human hurt.

About supper-time I again called at the cabin, and as I sat by the superfluous fire, I heard Coretta say: “Granpap, please pass the sorghum to little Dick.”

And granpap, like a stone image with a movable arm, passed the sorghum.

The full Southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly; so I left the house by what Sam called the stove-wood trail, a rear way softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will halt the foot; and mine poised in air for a second or less as I sighted a hemlock bough like laced jet against the moon; as if Night, in defense, had thrown a torn bit of her garment over the face of the usurper. When I touched earth again, I was on new, mysterious ground, so quickly are worlds created for us, the ramblers of the universe, tenants insatiable. The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my indiscretions. Like the roll of a hidden sea, the valleys whispered upward with the life that stirs by night, the smaller wings, that dart fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and the lithe, furry dwellers in secret that come out of the earth to thread, more graceful than swimmers, the channels of shadow. But that purring wave was only the foam-flower of a vastly bedded silence; silence in which Nature dreamed of a way to reconquer her world and rule alone; while, against that dream, Beauty everywhere uncovered her soul. In behalf of man, the first to divine her, the first to adore, she arrayed her magic, invincible if so was his love. Everywhere she shone; on the laurel shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of the orange fungi with their creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees, and the rocks that fed them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of golden light. The world of minute things pressed as hugely significant as the solar system. And as the sea, never hushed, the valley whisper reached for an intangible shore. High above me there was escape by way of a blue eternity, where two walls of cloud parted to show a chasm of sky. Lower down a mist wound reverently about a star, then crept elfishly to the most portentous peak, hanging there like a comic beard. While I waited its whim, a voice, too fervently human, came through the clump of bushes at my side. A second later, a tall figure bearing an armful of fagots was checkered disappearingly along the path toward the cabin.

The next morning when I recalled the sounds I had heard, and put them together understandingly, I had this: “K’rettie can make ’most as good headcheese as ever Cyn could.” And I knew that in Merlin language granpap had said: “My son’s wife, please God, is my daughter.”

III

If tree-worship was ever the religion of any tribe, I know that I am ancestrally bound to that folk. Once an artist told me of his happy method of protecting his wife, children, and friends from the outbursts incidental to genius. He would go to the woods and beat a tree until his symptomatic rage was exhausted. As if a tree-beater and a wife-beater were not cousins german in crime! And now I was going to steep my soul more heinously. The oak boards of my cabin roof had to be reinforced. I could not spend another winter with the snows driving in on me. A “board-tree” had to be felled before the sap was up; and on one of those days which are claimed by both spring and winter, but belong to neither, I set out with granpap, the most skilful board-maker in the Unakas, to select a victim.

“Now this white oak,” said granpap, pausing by a giant that gazed reflectively over the valley, “will make as good boards as you’d want to sleep under.”

“But, granpap, don’t you see--we are interrupting him.”

His eyes narrowed in the suspicious way of our first acquaintance.

“I mean he is sort of on duty here, as if the spirit of the woods needed a sentry just at this place.”

His glance became a cold squint, and I plunged for a practical argument.

“White oaks make good mast. We must think of the hogs. There’ll be three new litters to feed next winter.”

“I reckon you’re right,” he said, instantly at home. “And yander at the head of Flume Cove is a black oak that will make tollable boards if it don’t do better.”

“A black oak? With all that green moss on it? And look at the first branch. It has an elbow crooked round a bellwood. Would you divorce such a pair? What God hath joined, granpap.”

“Well, it wouldn’t make prize boards anyhow,” he said, moving on unregretfully.

Suddenly a fear gripped me. We were nearing a glen at whose door stood a tree which for me symbolized the perfect life. I had often wondered why no human being could achieve maturity so unblemished, and I never passed it without a wave of happy solemnity rolling over me. I began to talk about bee-trees, the only subject on which granpap was excitable. Thickly, hurriedly, I developed a rapacious interest in the wild bee and its hidden ways. And at the precise moment when we passed the pride of my woods, granpap was singsonging the lines which an old, old man had taught his grandfather when a boy:

“A swarm in May,
Count a dollar a day;
A swarm in June,
A silver spoon;
A swarm in July,
Not worth a house-fly.”

I had lured him safely by, and we neared the road again. His eye was on a tree with a long, perfect trunk, but which slanted from the root up, leaning over the road.

“I might do with that,” said he. “It’s dangerous thar anyway.”

“Dangerous! Don’t you see how strong it is, and how gently it leans over the road, like a great arm of blessing? I’m so used to that tree I should feel sure of accident overtaking me before I reached the village if I didn’t pass under it.”

Granpap halted. “I ain’t got time to waste corkusin’ around like this. I’ll go to the new ground and do some grubbin’. Then to-morr’ I’ll git up early and find a tree.”

I was dismissed, conscience-free.

Two warm days followed. On the second, I left my desk, feeling sure that I could find a sourwood in leaf on the south side of High Point. My path lay through the glen. Nearing it, I heard alarming sounds of activity, and running past the last obscuring half-acre of rhododendrons, I looked ahead. The pride of my woods measured his long trunk on the ground, half of his broken arms digging helplessly into the earth, the other half appealing to the winds, birds, and skies, that had loved him, for some mitigation of his doom. Granpap’s beaming face shone above the bleeding stump.

“You oughter seen him fall! Just et up those little chestnuts and poplars as he went down.”

And I had thought I heard thunder. Had even speculated on the peculiar crackling quality of the vibrations.

“I don’t know how I happened to miss it when we were lookin’ around. Now we’ll get some boards.”

A tightness of the throat kept me silent. Moreover, I could not rebuke him. He was too happy. Here was material worthy of his skill.

“Sam is going to help me saw the cuts and make the bolts,” he said. “Here he comes now.”

I turned away. I was the primary cause of the murder, but I could not stay to see the victim drawn and quartered.

A day or two later I had to carry a message to the board-maker. I found him a little sad.

“I’m gittin’ old,” he said. “These here boards are the sorriest I ever made.”

“But you’ve got a good pile of them, granpap.”

“Them’s my splinters,” he said, with high contempt, both for me and the boards. “That was the desaptivest tree I ever cut. I bumbed on it as fur as I could reach and it was plumb sound. But in choosin’ a board-tree you’ve got to ’low so much for what you don’t see.”

He sat down. Speech was coming on the tide of injury.

“A shore desaptive tree. Look at them cuts me and Sam made. Half a day’s work wasted in ’em.”

I looked at the great blocks and wondered how they had cunningly escaped further mutilation. And though I saw myself roofless for the next winter, I could not repress an inward bubble over the tree’s revenge.

“It had lost so many limbs when it was young and pushin’ up, that it was jest the snirliest tree I ever saw.”

“Snirly, granpap?”

“Ay, it must ’a’ been an awful thrifty tree. Every time a limb broke off it plumb healed up, an’ thar’s eight and ten rings over some of the scars. Here I’ve cut it down an’ split into it jest to find a lot of knot-holes spilin’ my best boards. And it looked so purty and straight.”

He got up, adjusted his brake, which was the strong fork of a limb chained to a log, fixed his bolt upright, set his adze carefully, and with precise restraint evenly separated a smooth, shining three-foot board from the rest of the bolt. From the splitting wood came an odor that must have been the essence of the forest condensed for generations into its living vase.

But granpap was not pleased with his work.

“Did you see how tough that was? When I do git a good board I have to tear it out. But it’s nateral for the south side of a tree to be tough.”

“Don’t you mean the north side, granpap?”

“No,” he said patiently. “It’s the sun that toughens wood. You’ll see them bolts from the north side are brickle.”

He balanced the board disapprovingly.

“Look how narr’ it is. By the time I’ve sapped this there won’t be enough of it left to turn a rain-drap.”

He began to chip off the inch of white sap-wood along the edge of the board.

“I could ’a’ cast out the snirly blocks, but it was the wind-shake that finally ruined me. I never counted on a wind-shake in a tree as proud as that.”

“Show me the wind-shake, granpap.”

“Look at this block, here in the crosscut, an’ you’ll see it. A wind-shake starts at the heart an’ twists round and round, gettin’ bigger and bigger an’ breakin’ the wood as it goes, till thar’s only enough left for a little narr’ board ’tween the shake-rings and the bark. Then sometimes, when the tree weaves in the wind, you can hear it cry. If I’d ’a’ listened at this tree in a high wind it couldn’t ’a’ fooled me. But they never make no sign on the outside.”

“Granpap,” I began slowly.

He looked up, met my eyes, and laid down his axe.

“Don’t you think some people are like that?”

I was trembling. If he failed me now, the line of Merlin would be extinct. There would be no more seers in the Unakas, or anywhere.

“Ay,” he said. He still used the “ay” of Westmoreland and the hills of Malvern. “Ay, Cyn was like that after Ben got killed.”

He thought my silence was the silence of sympathy, and in alarm took up his axe.

“’Tain’t no use to----”

The axe finished the sentence, slicing a curl of white sap-bark. But his face was a shade grayer. The tree was avenged.

I started on, thinking of all the Cyns and Bens I had known; and of a gay friend, now fallen, who liked to assure me that “A heart is known by the autopsy.” My foot turned up a boss of sweet turf. A broken heart makes as good loam as a sound one, I thought. And I would have gone down the slope singing in the face of a looming to-morrow, if only granpap had not been standing so still.

II

CORETTA AND AUTUMN

I

By pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how long I “stayed in”; and Coretta’s opinions always echoed the hearth voice of the clan.

But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them paling off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was “bad off.” Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta wanted to borrow such or such an article for breakfast. It was always something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a broken day.

For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her borrowing the day before. “Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me my mornings.”

She would promise; then it would happen again--the violent waking, with its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me.

“But I didn’t know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an’ we couldn’t eat biscuits ’thout salt in ’em.”

Or, “That man come after supper to see about sellin’ the cow, an’ we talked so late I clean forgot we didn’t have a speck o’ coffee for breakfast.”

Or, “I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an’ there was the box plumb empty.”

Or, “Uncle Rann got in last night. We didn’t have a dust o’ flour, an’ I couldn’t set him down to pone-bread an’ him come all the way from Madison to see us.”

Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight exasperation over my failure to get her point of view.

“But Sam had to git to the ploughin’ early, an’ you only had to jest set an’ write!”

That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress. It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or break into an untraceable legend of itself; but it never did. One day, looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog’s feet newly scalded. A sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning. A tub in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness, that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden interest in the baby’s attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from her continent of discovery, the ash-pan. Coretta snatched the baby and began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are unknown.

“If I could skip a year ’thout a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with my work,” she said.

But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God.

Her own mind was making occult connections. “Did you see the sign in the elements last night, Mis’ Dolly?”

I had not seen.

“It was jest after the rain stopped, an’ it was awful. There was a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin’ through it, an’ they ’most made letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was first wrote in, if we only had the preacher here to tell us. Nothin’ ’s goin’ to keep me from meetin’ next Sunday. I want to know if he read it an’ what it said. It may have been a warnin’ to them people to stop fightin’; but I reckon we all ort to be a little more keerful about doin’ the Lord’s will.”

I decided to defer any unorthodox suggestions, and divagated with: “What’s the matter with Irma’s nose?”

“She fell out o’ bed an’ nearly broke it. I had a time stoppin’ the blood. I was so scared at first I couldn’t remember the verse in the Bible that stops it right off, an’ I run aroun’ tryin’ everything else first. Then I got the verse right, an’ her nose never bled another drap.”

“What verse is that, Coretta?”

“The sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. Irmie never fell out of bed ’fore this, an’ it was time she did. I was right glad of it after I remembered the verse and got the blood stopped.”

“Why glad, Coretta?”

“You can’t raise a child that never falls out o’ bed. They die shore. Didn’t you know that, Mis’ Dolly?”

Her face was an eager flower, but what I saw was a glimpse of mediæval gates opening on time’s mossy twilights. Was it possible to pass through with Coretta, and look at the world with the eyes of a vanished age? Hitherto she had turned to me for scant crumbs of wisdom. Now she was aquiver with the reversal of our rôles.

“I’ve been afraid to tell you about sech things,” she said. “Some people jest laf at ’em. I been so sorry for you sometimes, doin’ things I knew were bad, an’ I dasen’t tell you.”

“What things, dear?”

“Oh, like sowin’ that sage in the garden. You shore have trouble if you sow sage. You have to get the bunches an’ set ’em out, or else get some strange woman ’at’s passin’ to sow it for you.”

“But isn’t that unfair to her?”

“No; she loses the trouble as soon as she crosses water. She’d only have to cross the branch by the spring an’ it ’ud be gone.”

That was the beginning of my subversion, which was soon alarmingly complete. If I had given Coretta crumbs, she now spread me a banquet. Her store of folk-wisdom fell upon me in showers that sometimes took my breath. Many of her rituals were too complex for memory here to set down, but she had scores of briefer ones, such as her cure for a dog’s tendency to vagabondage. With an auger greased with ’coon-oil made from a ’coon the dog had caught, you bore a hole in the gate-post. Then cut off a bit of the dog’s tail and fasten it in the hole; but do not let him see you. If he runs away after that, you can be sure he was peekin’ from somewheres.

She invited me to be present when granpap cured his mule of the swinney. Part one: we poured cold water on the mule’s shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint-rock until it smoked. Part two: carefully directed by Coretta, we laid the rock back where we had found it, same side up, “an’ pineblank the same way.” And we did indeed cure the mule.

But her remedy for fever was perhaps the gem of her store. You take fodder that has never been wet, grasp all you can in your hand, cut it squarely off above your hand, and squarely off below. Of the remainder left in your grasp make a tea. This tea is an unfailing cure for any kind of fever.

“Why didn’t you make it for Sam last year, Coretta?” I asked.

“We didn’t have any fodder that hadn’t been rained on. That’s the trouble with that cure. You can’t git fodder that hasn’t been wet. Every year I say I’ll cure a bit in the dry, but I always forgit about it till it’s too late.”

She was as learned in signs as in cures. “There,” she might say, “it’s goin’ to rain, an’ I’d laid out to wash to-morrow!”

“But the sky is clear, and there’s no wind from the west.”

“Didn’t you hear that rooster crow when he was gettin’ up into the cedar? If a rooster crows as he goes to his tree, his head’ll be wet ’fore he comes down. But maybe,” she reflected, casting no doubt on the oracle, “it’ll clear by sun-up, an’ I can wash anyhow.”

Her world of signs and portents and conjurations lay about her as familiar as her children’s faces, or the grass before her door. It touched her at every point and turn of her daily life. And then one day I impulsively clashed through it and shook its foundations. I was passing Sam’s cabin, when I saw, grouped at the roadside spring, Coretta, the children, and a young man who was holding the baby and lifting his shoe--yes, lifting his shoe to the baby’s mouth!

“Wait!” I cried, with a suddenness that made the strange young man drop the shoe, though luckily he retained the baby.

Coretta began to explain. “The baby’s got the thrash, an’ I ain’t got time to take her all the way to old Uncle Dean Larky’s for him to blow in her mouth.”

“Blow in her mouth? That toothless old man!”

“He’s got the power in his breath. Jest blows in her mouth an’ says the three highest words in the Bible. But I couldn’t go so fur, an’ I’ve been watchin’ for Zeb Austin to pass. He’s black-eyed, you know.”

I saw that the young man was black-eyed--at that moment rather flashingly, hostilely black-eyed. Whether a magician benignly engaged, or a fool caught in his act, the interruption called for resentment.

Coretta was still explaining. “If a baby’s got the thrash, an’ a black-eyed man person gives her a drink out of his right shoe, it’ll cure the worst case as ever was.”

“Give me the baby,” said I.

She was handed to me. I walked off, up the hill, where I could get a view of the broad valley and a sky clear with sunlight--as clear and welcome as the dry light of science. Coretta followed.

“What’s the matter, Mis’ Dolly?”

“Lies!”

“Don’t you believe it’ll cure her?”

“No.”

“Don’t you believe--any o’ them things?”

“No.”

“Give me my baby!”

The arrogant world of mind, for all its embattled glitter, surrendered to the physical fact of motherhood. I gave her the baby.

It was two weeks before I saw Coretta. The day was warm; I had been circling about a hot stove for hours, canning blueberries, and had thrown off my slippers for stockinged comfort. Coretta came into the yard just as I stepped to the door.

“Don’t move,” she called, beginning to run. “Don’t move till I git your shoes! Ever’ step you take is a step in trouble.”

Aghast, I obeyed her. When the shoes were brought, and on my feet, she looked up triumphantly. “I knew you wasn’t so unbelievin’ as you let on.”

And my surprised and chastened soul agreed.

II

One summer--it was a war summer--I thought by personal effort and example to swell the national harvest. I had suggested, advised, and implored. Now I would dig and plant and water, hoping that a beneficent contagion would transform my land from a wasteful reproach to a prolific blessing. My ambitious programme was interrupted midway by a distant call that could not be denied, and I had been a forgetful time away, when I realized, with aching insurrection, that Autumn must be in the Unakas. In my weariness I thought of her as a giant matron, seated amid her peaks, with hair flowing like rivers of copper, and arms stretched out with a vast tenderness to take even me to her bosom. And I fled toward her, my heart and mind exchanging jumbled murmurs of extenuation. Did not the country need all its farmers?

Coretta and her dancing youngsters did not meet me as usual under the white oak half-way up the mountain. I asked Serena, who joined me there, concerning the omission, and from her discreet evasion I surmised that a disclosure awaited me in Coretta’s trepidant breast. It was several days in fledging. I ignored the mystery, and plunged into the ardors of conservation. It became quickly evident that my example was not to be the little candle that far rebukes a wasteful world. Coretta did not come near me; and one morning, when I saw Serena approaching, her radiance visible a hundred yards away, I knew that only one thing could give such a tinge of glory to her countenance. She was coming to announce one of her sudden journeys. Yes, Len had agreed for her to visit a sister who lived sixty miles distant.

“With everything to do?” I cried.

“I can work harder after I come back. A ja’nt always helps me.”

That was true. She would look younger, by ten years, on her return.

“Can Len afford it now, Serena?”

“I told him I’d git the money from you, an’ work it out when I got back. I can put in several days ’fore fodder-pullin’. I reckon you’ll be wantin’ some help by that time,” she added, with a glance at the beans and tomatoes in piles on the kitchen porch. By that time, indeed!

Her radiance began to fade. Was it possible I could hesitate?

“I told Len you’d never refused me yit.”

With the money happily clutched, she turned a shining back upon me.

I started meekly to Coretta’s. But so many evidences of neglect seen on the way brought me to her in remonstrative mood.

She was very busy sewing. The children were to have new dresses. And in harvest-time!

“I thought I should find you canning, Coretta.”

“I ain’t got no heart this year,” she said.

I tried to recall some of the mottoes of the period. Every mouthful we save, and so forth. “And your brother is over there, you know.”

She dropped her head.

“I see your beans are not picked yet.”

“I jest ain’t got no heart.”

“Is that why you didn’t keep the weeds out of my garden?”

“Yes, Mis’ Dolly.”

“But I sent you the hat.”

Her head went lower. I had, while away, spent half of a much-needed day in search of a hat that would withstand mountain wear and weather, yet be pretty enough for Coretta’s taste.

“And you let the pigs get to my potato-patch.”

She turned to the machine. Well, it was my machine. I looked at the gay pieces of gingham scattered about and resolved to be drastic.

“I’m going to have the machine brought home, Coretta. You won’t have any time for sewing until you get your fruit and vegetables put up.”

She was dismayed. “Oh, I’ll never git ready!”

“Ready for what?”

“To go to the mills.”

“The mills!”

“We’re all goin’ to Georgia. Sam can git three dollars a day there. Katy can keep house an’ tend to the young-uns, an’ I’m goin’ to work, too. We can make ’tween five and six dollars a day. An’ I’ve got to have the machine. How’ll I ever git their clo’es made?”

She ran on, but I shrank aside, looking about me and counting the curly heads. Our supreme judiciary had that year annulled the law of the people for the rescue of the child in the mills.

“Coretta, you can’t take these babies----”

“Oh, I knowed you’d talk that way, but please don’t, for we’ve got to go. The tickets have come, an’ we have to use ’em inside o’ two weeks. I’m jest worn out workin’ on the farm like a man, an’ in the house, too. We’ll never git a start here.”

I had no argument against the truth. Once I had thought of making Sam the legal owner of that part of the farm he was supposed to till, and had consulted the village wise man about it.

“Let me see,” he said: “Sam gets the full product of his labor now, don’t he?”

“Oh, you read the book?”

“Sure, I did! And you keep the place up? Pay for fencin’, and the like?”

I admitted it.

“And the taxes?”

“Of course.”

“And he can’t make ends meet?”

“No.”

“Well, if I was Sam, I’d injunct aginst any change that ’ud saddle me with taxes and improvements.”

So I had made no change. And I had no answer for Coretta. She was still talking.

“They’ll give us a good house at the mill, an’ furnish it too.”

“If you pay three times over in instalments.”

“When I git enough for my house, I mean to move back.”

“You’ll never get it paid for, and if you leave they’ll sell it to somebody else. They count on getting pay from three families for every set of furniture they put out,” I exaggerated stoutly.

“You needn’t talk like that, Mis’ Dolly,” she said, with her face all protest. “I’ve got to go.”

“Very well.” I rose, and started out. Spying the hat that had cost me so much thought, I said: “You didn’t like the hat?”

Her face became an eager pink with satisfaction.

“Shore I liked it! Everybody says it jest suits me. I want everything like that hat!”

So my success had defeated me. She had been seduced by perfection. And I reflected, as I walked home, that even if one ended in a morass, it was something to follow the twinkling of a very little star. I had seen in Coretta the flutter of a potentiality that would one day redeem life from squalor and give the planet an unquenchable glow.

The first shock over, I could not stifle the thought that the loss of Sam would be an excellent thing for me. I could replace him with a man whose ideas of farming were not inherited from his great-grandfather: some one who would not make me poorer every year, and keep my wits exercised on the problem of his family’s support. And then, like the breaking of a soft light, the thought stole upon me that I need never again be roused from morning sleep to supply Coretta’s breakfast omissions. Let her go her way. I would not expostulate; I would not persuade; I would not even be sad. My pillow should be mine henceforth.

But I took care to avoid the children. This seemed necessary to the anticipated enjoyment of that pillow. I kept away from Coretta’s cabin, and when I saw bobbing curls nearing mine through the bushes, I had sudden errands elsewhere.

III

I had begun with the beans, fearing an early frost, and remembering the many summer dawns I had preciously invested in keeping the rows clean. They hung in green multiplicity, in spite of the choking weeds that had reared their heads high, unmolested by Coretta’s hoe. In fact, there was a disconcerting abundance all about me. Having set out to be an example of thrift, opportunity hung from every bush.

In this hand-to-hand engagement, I lost sight of general aims and purposes. The fourteen points were laid by for later digestion. My New York daily, ordered for filing through a momentous period, served excellently for wrapping winter stores. I did not quite cease to look at the labor horizon for epochal phenomena; but one day, after talking with a farmer on the relative value of two varieties of sweet potatoes, the Texas White and Early Beauty, I found this pencilled among my farm-notes: “The Bisbee deportation is mealy for fall use, but the Soviets are the best winter keepers.” Then I began to have misgivings; but I crushed the seditious rumbling and kept on the path indicated by the Department.

Serena returned, but went at once, as I had known she must, to the fodder-pulling, and I had only an occasional friendly hand lent me for help. I had moved my typewriter into the kitchen, thinking that odd moments might go to the making of a masterpiece; but if genius gave a surviving flutter, its tremolo was drowned by the drums and tabors of conservation pomp. To Nature’s tender surprises I became callous; and for her beauty that challenged obviously, I could say with Coretta that I had no heart.

Coretta, who knew of old that I rather liked sunsets, coming one day to borrow my last machine-needle, called my attention to an aggressively colored sky by saying it was like a pile of “greenlins an’ ’maters.” (Greenlands and tomatoes--yes.) I assented so readily that Coretta flushed with the success of her venture in poetics.

When she was gone, I reflectively picked a letter from my batch of half-read mail. It began: “Your last filled me with a veritable nostalgia for your mountain. The odor of ripened grains and fruits and new-cut wood overcomes me whenever I think of it. I see great white clouds rearing their domes against a deep, blue sky; and at my feet gentians star my way to you.”

I dropped the letter. Where was Autumn? How had I lost her? Like a spear-thrust the question kept recurring until the next day, when Aunt Janey Stiles came.

IV

Aunt Janey lived over the mountain on Juniper Creek, three miles west of me, and carried all her supplies on her shoulder from the village two miles to the east. On her way out she would take eggs, butter, chickens, beans--anything exchangeable at the village store--and on her way in would carry flour, coffee, sugar, salt, soda, and lard. She had done this for forty years, and looked wiry and tenacious enough to do it for forty more. She sometimes paused for half a day, and once spent the night with me; but, unlike the neighborly highlanders, would never turn a hand to help me. She watched me work as she might have attended a play, and this did not make for the smoothness of my operations; but I was always glad to see Aunt Janey. Her attainments did not include a knowledge of the alphabet, but her mind sometimes revealed a glitter that made me think her brown, withered body held an old-world spirit--Greek, perhaps--a Periclesian favorite.

“I wasn’t meanin’ to stop,” she said, as her sack slid from her shoulders; “but seein’ the big kittle smokin’ in the yard, I ’lowed you’s makin’ apple butter, an’ I like to watch it poppin’. Don’t you quit stirrin’. I’ll fetch me a cheer from the kitchen. The sun’s as soft as an old blanket to-day.”

She returned with the chair, and continued: “You’ve got to watch apple butter closer’n a creepin’ baby if anybody’s goin’ to eat it.”

Did she know that I had burned up one kettleful? Though I had tried to remove all trace of it, there might be a treacherous odor in the air.

“That’s so, Aunt Janey,” I said; “but I’m going to take time to empty this anyway.” And I took up a tub of apple-parings. I could utilize those parings in three ways, and for that triple reason I wished them to disappear quickly.

“They’re tellin’ all around that you’re powerful agin wastin’ stuff,” said Aunt Janey when I had returned, in a tone so intentionally colorless that I became suspicious and defensive.

“I am. And I could have carried those parings to Sam’s hogs; but Sam would be lazier to-morrow than he is to-day. And I could have made vinegar out of them; but I’d have had to take Len from the field to bring back the barrel that Serena borrowed last year. And I could make jelly. But with all those fine jelly apples lying around in bushels on the ground, why should I save parings?”

“You forgot beer,” said Aunt Janey.

“Beer?” I faltered.

I had elderberry wine, and blackberry cordial, and peaches brandied in brown sugar as dietetic allurements, but had made no provision for beer.

“Best beer you ever drunk by a hickory fire in the dead o’ Jinniwary. Stir, gal, stir!”

I stirred. “But I don’t drink beer,” said I brightening, “and nobody ought to now.”

“You don’t eat pickle either--tomato-pickle, cabbage-pickle, beet-pickle, pickylilly, onion-pickle, pickle everything. An’ you kain’t eat much p’sarves, but I noticed you had ’most all sorts when I looked over your stock.”

“But the plain fruits and vegetables--everybody likes them.”

“You’re a leetle short on some of ’em, ain’t you? Had a nice lot o’ beans to spile on you, didn’t you?”

I had buried the contents of twelve large jars in the garden after dark, hoping that my influence as a conserver would not be diminished. How did she know? I looked up from my stirring and met a glance of Aspasian dubiety. She didn’t know. She had been guessing. But my start had betrayed me. As soon as I was caught, she became sincerely consoling.

“Tut, gal, beans are always hard for a beginner. It was that run you took off at night, I reckon. I knowed when I passed you’d be in the night with it; an’ I knowed they’d spile, you was so flustered. It takes a ca’m sperret to put up beans to stay. Leather breeches is safer.”

She took up her sack.

“There’s a powerful lot o’ wild grapes this year.”

“Is there?” I said, so dispiritedly that she put down her sack.

“Biggest and juiciest I ever seen. A body ought to put up a lot o’ grapes. They’re so tonicky. An’ they make the nicest jelly there is for the sick. Tarty like. Apple jelly’s too tame for a stomach ’at’s off a bit. Not speakin’ agin yourn, seein’ you got such a power of it. An’ namin’ the sick, ain’t you never thought o’ puttin’ up mullin? There’s enough for Europe an’ Ameriky too in your new ground, an’ it’ll shore cure that winter cough people has--cure it right now. If you don’t mean to break off at all, if you ain’t goin’ to stop anywheres, if I’s you I’d fix up some good yarb medicines. You can send them to the soldiers. There’s shumake for a swelled throat, an’ boneset for the ager, an’ pokeweed for rheumatiz, an’ spignet for consumption, an’ a lot more I’ll show you if you go home with me some time. Things to he’p folks, ’stead of a lot of stuff to chuck up the stomach an’ make ’em sicker. S’pose you go home with me right now.”

“With so much to do?” I said. “Oh, I couldn’t!”

“There’ll always be something to do, gal. If we lived till we finished up, the world ud be full of Methuselys, an’ no room for the young folks. Nobody finishes. They got to break off.”

She shouldered her sack and started, pausing a rod away for one more barb.

“You goin’ to gether yer sunflower-seed? I’ve hearn they eat ’em in Rooshia.”

Aunt Janey was right: I had the uncomfortable habit of hanging on for a finish that the gods would never uncover. And what could I do about it? There was one answer--Serena. She could break off without a qualm. She could sing the doxology while doing it, and give the Amen a sprightly reverberation.

Without daring to pause, I started off, stepping as briskly as Aunt Janey, but in the opposite direction. I would get Serena to come and clear away every sign of conservation, and I would walk on the mountains while she was doing it. If only I might find her in the disengaged period she would be sure to observe between fodder-pulling and sorghum-making!

As I neared Len’s cabin the odor of boiling syrup told me I was too late. I arrived and looked drearily on the scene. A shouting boy was busily driving the oxen that turned the cane-mill, which was spouting with juice. More juice foamed in the boiler on the furnace. Len, his seven children, three neighbors, and their children, were officiating in various or the same parts. Serena was skimming the boiling syrup. All the country round acknowledged her as the queen of “lassy-makers.” She turned a heated face to me just long enough to say with the most cheerful of smiles: “They don’t give me time to make my beds.”

I was turning away, when Len stopped me.

“We’ve taken off one biler, an’ I put a few ’lasses for you in that jug. Reenie, git the jug!”

“I don’t want them,” I said, near to tears, and trapped in the vernacular.

Len was puzzled.

“But you’re welcome to the ’lasses. I’ll bring ’em up to you.”

“Not a spoonful, thank you, Len,” I called, already vanishing and hastening my steps unconsciously until I found myself running--running up-hill. I did not turn on the trail toward home, but went out to Three Pine Point, where one could see the river miles away, smooth, effortless, winding to some hidden land, safe and far from the malefic spirit of industry. I dropped to the brown pine-needles. Quickly the woods set their magical currents flowing, and that sensation as of smiling veins crept over me.

Then I saw Nellie Ludd, or part of her. One could get only partial glimpses of Nellie in the woods--an upreaching arm, a strip of skirt, the sheen of her head. No, she was not golden-haired, or green-kirtled, and she did not lead the fancy back to Tempe and the vales of Arcady. Her dress was dingy brown in hue, and of cloth woven on her mother’s loom, but fashioned by herself as fittingly to her grace as fur to the marten or feathers to the swallow. Her eyes, if ever you met them, you would find to be honey-brown, like the first falling leaves. Her hair was the color of darkly shining smoke, and seemingly as loath to stay put. And the world she led the fancy to was a world which none of us have seen, but to which all secretly intend to go; a world whose picture every man holds in his heart, but will not look at in the light lest his neighbor come upon him suddenly. For, though we may have learned to love our neighbor as ourself, we have not yet learned to trust him.

It was a gracious chance that brought me to the Point just as Nellie was leaving it. “Breaking off” was no longer difficult. That sputtering kettle--how remote and absurd it seemed!

Descending late in the afternoon, my hills seemed to shine upon me, reflecting happy restoration. I passed by the pasture ridge where the silence was tapped by the falling chestnuts, and felt no impulse to defeat the squirrels and gophers of their prize. A bellwood crowned with purple bushels of grapes stirred no acquisitive instinct. I went calmly through the orchard, picking my way over the fallen fruit that no hand would rescue from decay; looked unwistfully at the pumpkins, cushaws, and “candy-roasters” that would feed nothing but the frost; and from my cabin step smiled at the flaming wing of a young maple that was like a vivid aspiration airily detaching itself from the clutch of utility and the lures of bounty.

When I went in, Serena herself could not have cast a more contented eye about my kitchen, turbulent with unfinished tasks. The autumnal spirit had effectually bathed my lacerations. The box on which conveniently rested my little typewriter was invitingly near. I sank, a willing non-resistant, into a chair, and my hands mechanically sought the keys of the machine. For a few minutes I seemed to be having a pleasant time, with consciousness unaroused to the issue. Then I took out the sheet and read:

“Goodly Autumn comes again;
Fills my cupboard, fills my bin;
Piles the leaves beneath my shed
For my pony’s winter bed.

Goodly Autumn comes again;
Mellows apples, mellows sin;
Drops the bars in every place;
All the world is out to gaze.

Goodly Autumn with her bread!
Surely now the poor are fed;
And in peace I may sit down
To my fill of white or brown.

Autumn is so good to me;
I will walk abroad and see
If the earth and if the sun
Sup as well as I have done.”

“This is how they feel,” thought I, as I drowned in placidity without a bubble struggling overhead. “This is why protracted meetings are held in autumn. Ah, I will call my poem ‘The Season of Piety.’”

I began to feel like the good wife of a deacon. Nay, I was the deacon himself, and blushed in his elderly trousers.

With her usual ghostly suddenness, Katy appeared.

“Mommy’s got the milkweed in her breast agin, an’ the baby’s all broke out; she’s afraid it’s the measles an’ we’ll all take ’em.”

I rose. Certainly they would all take them. The season of piety was ended.

Both cases were happily light, and when Coretta looked up from her pillow and said, “We ain’t goin’ away. I’ve been thinkin’ what it ud be like to git sick away from home an’ everybody,” I did not feel that a slight reproof would be cruel.

“Stay? With nothing laid in for the winter?”

“But you’ve put up such a lot.”

My heart, which had softened at sight of her young cheek tracked red with the whimsical fever, felt a stony relapse.

“You know, Coretta, I have had to consider other plans.”

She was terrified, but unbelieving. The heavens could not really fall.

“You wouldn’t let us stay?”

“On one condition, perhaps.”

Her face shone with relief. She had met conditions before, and melted through them.

“What’s that, Mis’ Dolly?”

“You’ll never wake me up again to borrow something for breakfast?”

“No, I shore won’t.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Swear to God?”

“Swear to God.”

I looked down at the lovely face, contented with the thought of being sick and at home, and my smile undid me.

“Swear to God,” she repeated feebly, “unless, o’ course, we’re jest smack out o’ stuff.”

III

SERENA AND WILD STRAWBERRIES

I

She was not an unalloyed joy that first year of our friendship. Her imperturbability did not always seem as a restful evergreen wall, in whose shadow I could sit until perplexities lost their heat. At times it was a “no thoroughfare” with the meadows of desire gleaming beyond.

I called one day and found her churning by the spring, a pleasing picture, too, under the trees. Her rounded, youngish figure gave no hint of her seven-fold maternity, and however ragged the rest of her family might be, she always magically managed to be neat. She was singing leisurely and churning in rhythm--a most undomestic performance; but my eye was not Mrs. Poyser’s, and if it had been, it could not have embarrassed Serena.

“I’m takin’ my time,” she said, “fer this is my last churnin’ fer a good spell, I reckon.”

“Your last? Why, is the cow sick?--dead? And you have just bought her?” I asked, my concern sharpened perhaps by the thought of a very inconvenient loan that had gone abysmally into her purchase.

“She got so many sweet apples last night she’s foundered herself--clear light ruined, granpap says.”

“Surely you didn’t turn her into the orchard?”

“Why, a few apples wouldn’t hurt her. But there was a whole passel on the ground that I couldn’t see fer the weeds an’ briers. An’ she got ’em.”

“But I lent Ben my scythe to cut those briers.”

“His poppie needed him in the field, an’ he couldn’t git the time right off. When he did, we couldn’t find that scythe nowheres. I hate it about the cow,” she assured me cheerfully; “but it had to happen, I reckon.”