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 sumpin wrong with her. If there is I s'pose we'll find it out soon enough."

They found it out next day. In the morning when Judith went out to milk her, her teats were as flat and flabby as if the calf had just sucked her dry. The calf was tied in the shed and had not been with her. When Judith came back into the kitchen Jerry was dumbfounded at the sight of the empty bucket.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said, and stood scratching his head in perplexity. Then his face brightened with an idea. "I tell you, Judy, I'll bet she sucks herse'f. She's got the build of a caow that kin do it."

Through the day they watched her and found that it was even as Jerry had surmised. He threw on his cap and went over to Crupper's place where Uncle Sam, being the brother of Aunt Amanda Crupper, was staying.

"Say, looky here, Uncle Sam, whatcha mean by sellin' me a caow that sucks herse'f?"

Uncle Sam looked up from the piece of harness that he was mending for his brother-in-law and smiled a little quizzically.

"Waal, Jerry, somebody's gotta be the owner of a caow that sucks herse'f, hain't they?"

"Aw, come on naow, Sam, you know that's a dirty trick to play on a neighbor." Jerry kicked into the ground savagely. "Whatcha goin' to do about it?"

Uncle Sam looked a little hurt.

"Naow, Jerry, don't git mad. When I'm a-dealin' with a neighbor I like to tell him the truth, an' mos' allus I do tell him the truth. But there's times when it comes jes a little hard to tell him all the truth, an' this here is one o' them times. Naow, Jerry, a caow that sucks herse'f is jes as good as any other caow pervidin' you don't let her suck herse'f."

He went back into the stable and came out with a wire contraption dangling from his hand.

"You jes fasten this here little muzzle on her nose an' she won't suck herse'f no more. When she's a-grazin' it falls

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 away off'n her nose and lets her eat, an' when she tries to suck herse'f it's there. You jes put that on her an' she won't give you no more trouble. I'll stand back o' what I said that she gives good milk an' lots of it. Judy an' the baby'll take on flesh fast when they git to drinkin' that good milk."

Warmed by the glow of Uncle Sam's genial personality, Jerry had to smile.

"Why didn't you gimme it yestiddy, along with the rope an' halter?"

They laughed together.

"Waal, Jerry, I won't say I didn't know you'd be back after it."

They named the little girl Annie.

The winter after she was born was a hard one with unusually frequent cold spells. In Scott County the weather is never very cold for long periods. Most of the time it is dull and cloudy, with dismal rains and deep, sticky mud underfoot. Sometimes, however, the wind sweeps icily from the north, freezes the mud, and sends the thermometer for a night or so down to zero.

In the house in the hollow the Blackfords had been protected from gales; but now they knew all the changes of the wind. Perched shakily on the top of the ridge, the flimsy little house rocked and strained before the raging northwesters and piercing northeasters. The loose-fitting window sashes rattled; the doors stirred uneasily. The bits of old rag carpet laid upon the floor rose in waves as the wind billowed under them. The unceiled house, no snugger than a wagon shed, let in wind and cold everywhere. The wind fluttered the towels over the wash bench and rattled the saucepans that hung on the wall beside the stove.

On cold, windy mornings, when Jerry got up to light the fire, the house was no warmer than the out of doors. The water bucket was frozen. The milk in the pans was crusted with ice. Cold boiled potatoes left over from the day before were frozen into rocks and eggs were cracked open. The slop

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 bucket on the floor in the corner was frozen solid and the bucket sprung from the force of the expanding ice.

On such mornings it took a long time to get things thawed out so that they could have breakfast; and even the fire did not have much effect on the icy atmosphere. If the wind was from the west it created such a strong draught that it drew all the heat up the chimney. If it was from the east, the stove drew badly and belched forth intermittent clouds of smoke and spatterings of ashes. The fuel, too, was not of a sort that makes much heat. The tobacco growers take no thought for the morrow in the matter of wood. The wood is cut each day as it is needed, frequently by the women. It is usually green saplings or half rotted fence rails. These latter are often sodden from recent rains and have to be dried out in the oven to make them burn at all. When at last they do burn they give only a faint glow of heat.

Judith grew waspish when the fire would not burn. On Sundays, when Jerry was home from the stripping room, she raged at him for not providing better wood. He was churlish and disheartened because much of the tobacco that he was stripping had been bitten by frost. He snapped back at her and sulked and when she was not looking sneaked away to the kitchen of some neighbor who had a warmer house and a less irritable wife.

She was left alone in her prison with the chilly and restless children. On cold days she kept the two boys dressed in all their outdoor clothing, even to their mittens. When she took the little girl out of her cradle, she wrapped her in shawls and blankets.

Jerry had raised a patch of cane that year. He hauled up cane and stacked it all around the house to try to turn the wind. The cows, drawn by the smell of the cane, kept breaking through the rickety fence; and soon had it all eaten up. He stacked up more; but as fast as he stacked it, the cows broke in and ate it up. All around the house they left hoofprints and round, brown cakes of dung the size of a large dinner plate.

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 All day long for days together, as long as the cold spell lasted, the slop bucket stood frozen solid in the corner, anchored to the floor by a surrounding island of ice. When at last the thaw came and the ice melted, the leaky bucket, its bottom sprung outward, teetered unsteadily and slowly dribbled its dirty contents.

While the cold spell lasted Judith kept keyed up, energetic and irascible. With the thaw she relaxed into an exhausted torpor. As she wearily heaved out the contents of the greasy slop bucket and washed up the floor under it she sighed and her eyelids fell together asking for sleep.

There were war prices for tobacco that year. They ran as high as forty cents a pound. But the summer had been a dry one and the tobacco was light and of poor quality. Much of it, too, had been nipped by an early frost. Jerry thought himself lucky to get a check for two hundred and thirty-six dollars. Out of this he had to pay forty-seven dollars for hired help.

Guss Dibble, whose wife had a new baby, traded his crop for a cow, and considered that he was doing well.

The winter was a constantly recurring round of thaws and cold spells. It lasted far into March. It seemed as if it would never end. At last the change came all of a sudden and it was summer again.

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suavely and benignly after the cruel winter, the warmth fell like a softly enfolding presence. Spring is a gracious season in Kentucky, full of the smell of flowering locusts, of birdsong, and happy mornings. With sunlight falling through open doors and windows, the children playing outside and the baby asleep in her cradle, the house that all winter had been a cluttered, stinking prison became by contrast quiet, spacious, and restful.

Stimulated by the change, Judith cleaned house, raked up the yard, and burned the winter accumulation of rubbish, set out her garden and even planted some seed of sweet peas and nasturtiums about the house. The caressing spring days filled her with a sense of calmness and passive wellbeing.

She never sang or romped any more. She could not rejoice and be glad with these things of nature. But out of her calm torpor she looked at them as through a thin mist and they sank upon her spirit like healing on a wound. She grew very fond of sitting on the doorstep.

It was that spring that the United States began to make preparations to send young men to Europe to fight for democracy.

A black wave of fear darkened the sunshine of Scott County when it became known that the United States had entered the war. Gus Dibble's vague apprehensions that the trouble might come their way had incredibly been realized. Out of the mouth of a fool the truth had come, and the impossible had happened. The war had crossed the ocean and was among them and was going to take them away from their homes. A few restless and physically fit young blades like Ziemer Whitmarsh and Bob Crupper found in the news the glorious promise of adventure. A few hailed it as a hope of deliverance from irk-

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 some conditions of life. But to most of these simple youths who had never been more than twenty miles away from their own dooryards it brought terror, stark and appalling: terror of the unknown into which they would be dragged from the security of their home cabins and tobacco patches, terror of death and of the unknown after death. In the tired bodies and shrinking minds of these underfed young men there was little to foster a thirst for adventure, still less any feeling of adherence to such a middle class luxury as patriotism. No newspapers nor shouting demagogues came to them with the lies that create and feed an artificial frenzy. For them there were neither crowds nor music nor public acclaim: no showy paraphernalia to hide the stinking carcass of war; only the naked certainty, faced and pondered upon in solitude, that inevitably that dreaded and all-powerful machine known as the law would reach out for them, take them out of their homes, away from the comfort of familiar faces, and place them they knew not where. Knowing nothing of the law and its processes, they feared and respected it beyond all other things. To them it was a god much more real and powerful than the still less known God of the Bible.

It was the most timid among them who developed the boldness of desperation and dared to hide themselves from the recruiting officer. They dropped out of sight, fled away to the hill country. Often they were brought back ignominiously and given a year in jail. Sometimes they were never heard of again.

For the most part, the young men shambled mechanically about the barnyard and behind the plow, trying with indifferent success to cultivate stoicism, afraid of being thought cowards, waiting in cold terror until their time should come.

Fear and hate lay at the hearts of the mothers. And having fewer pretenses to keep up than their sons and less respect for vested authority, they gave free voice to their feelings. Mothers whose sons had been caught in the draft said hard and bitter things behind the backs of the more fortunate ones whose offspring had escaped. There was weeping into midnight

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 pillows, there was terror and dismay, envy, and hard suspicion.

Elmer, the second oldest Gibbs boy, shot himself in the foot while he was out hunting. Nobody knew why or what he was hunting at that time of year. He was lamed for life, so Dr. MacTaggert said; but he didn't have to go.

Marsh, his elder brother, was all agog to get into the fray. He had been listening to the talk of Bob and Ziemer; and being something of a braggart like his father, he had begun to lust for military adventures.

One afternoon when he was plowing near by, he took refuge in the Blackford kitchen from a heavy thunderstorm. From time to time, as he sat close to the door, he cast a swift glance at Judith who stood by the table ironing a Sunday shirt for Jerry. When she went to the stove to change her iron, he followed her movements with eyes that peered furtively from under the brim of his frayed straw hat.

"Well, Marsh," she said, "I hear you're a-goin' into the war."

His face brightened.

"You betcha. Me an' Bob an' Ziemer is a-goin' to clean 'em up good."

"An' what you a-goin' to fight for, Marsh?"

"I dun—" He checked the word before it was out of his lips. "What we a-goin' to fight fer? Why, fer our rights, o' course. An' we're a-goin' to lick 'em, too, the hull lot of 'em."

"Haow do you mean, the hull lot of 'em? Who all air you a-goin' to lick?"

"Why, all them furriners o' course: the Germans an' the Turks an' the Eyetalians an' the French an' the whole lousy shootin' match."

Among the women a few bright particular spirits like Aunt Eppie, who had no sons of an age to come within the selective draft, burned with righteous zeal against the Hun. And as the tigress is more fierce and pitiless than her male companion, so the hatred in the hearts of these women burned with a more cruel, intense, and implacable fury than a man's heart is able to sustain. Aunt Eppie, who had gloried in her neutrality be-

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 fore the United States went into the war, considering the belligerents all equally despicable and trifling, now could not find enough words of praise for the Allies, nor heap sufficient ignominy on the Germans. When Aunt Eppie spoke of the unspeakable Hun and the idolatrous Turk, her cold gray eyes flashed with the steely gleam of a scimiter, her false teeth came together with a fierce click, like a rat trap closing down on an unfortunate lover of cheese, and her imperious, bony knuckles rapped the table with a sound as suggestive of finality as the driving of nails into a coffin.

Jerry's mother, Aunt Mary Blackford, was another who was consumed with the fires of hate. At any mention of the enemy Aunt Mary's personality changed from kittenish to tigerish. It was an uncanny thing to see this small, frail woman, so given over to the service of others, so devoted to her husband, her sons, and her grandchildren, so kind and friendly toward her neighbors, turn into a spiteful, vicious virago at the mere mention of people of whom she knew nothing whatever. As the cat's claws are sharp and pitiless, so something hard, cruel, and implacable stretched itself at this crisis out of Aunt Mary's velvet exterior. Her blue eyes, ordinarily mild and childlike, could flash with as cold a gleam as Aunt Eppie's gray ones. Her mouth could shut in lines as hard and pitiless. Her baby-like hands, fluttering in excited anger, seemed to Judith even more savage claws than Aunt Eppie's imperiously tapping knuckles. The younger woman felt something akin to hate rise in her own breast as she turned coldly away from Aunt Mary's demonstrations of righteous indignation.

"I reckon," she said, looking with coolly level eyes at her mother-in-law, "if you'd been born a German you'd be the fust one to hate us Americans same's you're a-hatin' the Germans naow. An' either way there'd be about as much sense to it."

Aunt Mary bridled fiercely under Judith's cold gaze.

"Well, I'm thankful I hain't one o' them that's without no nat'ral human feelin's," she spat out, then was silent, unable to find words to express her irritation and chagrin. The at-

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 mosphere was dense with the intensity of the two women's dislike for each other.

"When times like these comes, they show up folks in their real nater," sniffed Aunt Mary, after an angry pause.

"Yes, they do," answered Judith, with cold incisiveness.

Jerry, the only true devotee of peace, was made miserable when his wife and his mother sparred about the war. He shifted uneasily and looked from one to the other with dumbly beseeching eyes, like those of a gentle dog.

One morning when she was churning on the porch, Bob Crupper sauntered around the corner of the house.

For some time he hung about, talking of this and that: last night's rain that would bring the tobacco beds along, the new flagpole that they had just set up in the school yard, the big price that the sheep men were going to get for their wool. As he talked, he sat on the edge of the porch and whittled aimlessly at a stick or trundled a toy wagon up and down the porch floor with his hand.

At last, after a silence broken only by the thump of the dasher in the churn, he roused himself and stood up.

"Well, I must be a-goin'. I'm off to-night for the trainin' camp. So I'll say good-by."

She released the dasher and gave him her hand. He took it in his which was large, firm, and warm. His face twitched with embarrassment.

Suddenly she felt his face close to hers and heard his voice in a quick, hoarse whisper.

"Judy, mebbe I won't never see you agin. I'm to hev one kiss anyway afore I go."

She felt herself melting into his arms as he kissed her on the mouth long and passionately. The next moment he was gone.

Her hands trembled as she took hold of the dasher again. Had she kissed him back or had she not kissed him back, she wondered. For a long time her lips burned from his kiss, as once before her neck and shoulder had burned from his look.

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 In June the neighborhood was thrown into a flutter of excitement by the coming of two evangelists. People said that they were from a little sect in the hill country. They stopped with Uncle Joe Patton, who was himself a religious man and a total abstainer, and they were to hold their meetings in Uncle Joe's house. All the neighbors were urged to attend the meetings.

Jerry was again working beyond his strength. He was determined to have a big tobacco crop this year. It was whispered that the price of tobacco would go sky high on account of America being in the war. He was becoming grouchy from the strain of overwork. Judith, with three babies to care for, could give no help.

"I hain't a-goin' to be drug to none o' their godforsaken meetin's," he said testily to Judith, when she mentioned the evangelists. "I'm too damn tired nights to do anything but turn in. But there hain't nothin' to keep you from goin' if you've a mind. I'll be here in the house with the young uns. All I ast is don't wake me up when you come home."

The thought of the evangelists piqued Judith's curiosity. Her life was easier now that summer had come; and her peaceful apathy was beginning to be stirred by slight tremors of returning interest in things. She had never listened to an evangelist since that half forgotten night when she was ten. She decided to go.

On the way she called for Hat. She knew that Hat would be going. As she expected Hat was preparing to start and had made elaborate toilet preparations. She had frizzed her hair so that it stood out violently on all sides, and she was wearing a stiffly starched pink calico dress. Under the dress Judith glimpsed the red petticoat.

Luke, in his sock feet, stretched luxuriously in an old rocker.

"I reckon you two is spilin' fer sumpin to do," he said, giving them a swift disdainful glance, as he spat into the woodbox. "An' if them lousy preachers'd foller the plow a spell or do a little wrastlin' on the end of a shovel through the day,

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 they wouldn't be so spry about draggin' the wimmin out nights."

"Aw, shet up," returned Hat. "I guess seekin' the Lord nights is jes as good as huntin' foxes anyway. You don't need to hand out no lip."

They walked across fields to the Patton home, each carrying a lantern, for there was no moon. The night was warm and sweet with the smells of summer. Blackberry bushes reached sharp tentacles out of the dark and made Hat gather her precious dress more closely about her.

"I wisht the meetin's was held anywheres but at Patton's place," she fretted. "It's so durn hard to git to, an' when you git there it's so lonesome lookin' it seems like it's hanted. The old folks all says it's hanted. It gives me the chills."

They crossed one creek on a plank and another on a log. Hat's great bulk teetered uneasily on the log and she thought of her clean dress and white stockings.

"Durn hard place to git to," she muttered.

The light wind was balmy and full of woodsy fragrance. In one place a whiff from a flowering alfalfa field came to them on the warm air heavy and sweet.

In a corner of a pasture their footsteps startled some sheep invisible in the darkness. A shivery sound of the movement of many soft bodies and then the patter of innumerable small feet told them that the sheep had scampered away. A few who had become separated from the main flock bleated inquiringly. The others answered: "This way, sisters, this way."

Judith felt strangely stirred and elated. It was an adventure, this coming out into the warm, soft, fragrant night. She thrilled to hear the sheep pattering away into the darkness calling to each other.

A rough wagon track down the side of a steep hill covered with brush and stunted trees brought them to the clearing about the Patton house. It was a tall old house built of heavy logs that had once been whitewashed. It rose corpselike in the

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 dim light of the stars. Small dark windows piercing the thickness of the logs looked out from the pallid walls like eyes.

The house was hemmed in on every side. On the north, from which they had approached it, the hill rose abruptly. East and west the woods crept almost to the doors. On the south was Stony Creek, a torrent in winter, a wide, half dried up river bed in summer. Wagons to get to the place must either come down the steep hill or ford the river. The house was shaded by aged gray willows. Of evenings it was swathed in vapors from the river bed.

There was a vague story whispered about the place: a story of one of those atrocious murders that occur from time to time in out-of-the-way places, where solitude and the emptiness of life teach the mind to brood. Such morbidly brooding minds sometimes flare out into sudden, grim passions, craving the sacrifice of blood.

Such a story was told about the Patton place. Perhaps it had a basis of fact. Perhaps it was only a myth grown out of the sinister appearance of the house and the dark-crannied minds of the tobacco growers. It was old and vague and told with many variations.

"Land alive, but it's a pesky, shivery place," complained Hat. "An' it's damp an' dirty, too. I despise sech a place. I wouldn't live here fer no money."

Light shone from one window of the Patton house, and several low-burning lanterns stood by the door. They added their own to the gleaming cluster and pushed open the door.

Uncle Joe Patton was praying. In the half light cast by a tall, thin glass lamp with a tiny wick, a dozen or so women and perhaps half a dozen men knelt upon the floor before planks laid from chair to chair. Two dogs sat at respectful attention and one was curled up under the table. A large black cat slept on the flattened patchwork cushion of the only rocking chair in the room. The heavy beams of the low ceiling, blackened with smoke and hung with cobwebs, seemed to absorb into their gloom the light of the small lamp.

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 Uncle Joe's prayer was long and meandering, like all his talk. He was a very old man, and like many other old men harped constantly upon a certain few things, saying them over and over again, each time as impressively as if they were quite new to the patient listener. He addressed the Lord in like manner. His voice rumbling along in the level monotone appropriate to prayer was as drowsy as the humming of bees over a clover field. Judith, who had been standing at the washtub most of the day, caught herself nodding into sleep as she knelt at the end of one of the planks.

She was roused from one of these dozes by Uncle Jabez's dog poking his moist nose into her face; and she began to peer about from under her sunbonnet in quest of the two strangers. She found them easily enough; but their heads were so devoutly bowed in prayer that there was nothing of them to be seen but backs and shoulders. She saw Hat's eyes traveling in the same direction as her own, and encountered the bored gaze of Uncle Jabez and the twinkling gray eyes of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, who was taking a look around after having consulted his watch.

She dozed a little; and when she roused herself and fell to peeping again she caught an exchange of looks between Abbie Gibbs and Ziemer Whitmarsh.

Aunt Jenny Patton, who suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to put the yeast into the rising of bread, rose at this moment and slipped unobtrusively into the back kitchen. The cat in the rocking chair yawned and stretched, then curled again deliciously. Still Uncle Joe droned along. The kneelers stirred more and more uneasily trying to relieve their cramped legs and aching knees.

At last, when they had almost lost hope, Uncle Joe droned to an end; and they all stood up with sighs of relief and were led into a hymn. The two evangelists and Jabez Moorhouse were the only ones who really sang. The others made vague, inarticulate sounds, took breath gaspingly and quavered uneasily into silence. Uncle Joe, in an aged tremolo, tried hard to follow, but was like a dog that has lost the scent.

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The evangelists were both rather good singers, and Jabez had a sonorous bass. The tune went wailing to the smoky rafters, wistful and melancholy.

During the hymn Judith and everybody else gazed curiously at the evangelists.

They were farmer folk like herself she knew by the sure intuition with which people know their own kind. One was tall and flimsy of body, with a receding chin, bulging eyes light blue in color, prominent teeth and a large Adam's apple. She seemed to have seen him before or somebody like him. He made her think of a fish. He looked innocent, kindly, and stupid.

The other was shorter and more compactly built. There was nothing remarkable about his face or figure except that he had strange, arresting eyes that seemed to smolder with a dark, inward flame. The eyes fascinated her. Again and again she felt her own drawn toward them. Twice during the singing she met his gaze and turned away her own abashed and in confusion.

When the singing was over, the evangelist with the strange eyes began to preach a sermon, taking as his text the words, "Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." As soon as he began to speak, she knew that his voice matched his eyes. It was glowing, fiery, and under the fire rich with tenebrous depth. He talked about sin and the wrath to come, the raging fires of eternal damnation and the worm that never dieth. As he talked the smoldering glow of his strange eyes burst into flame. The familiar cant phrases of revivalist exhortation falling glibly from his tongue took strength and color from the fire of his dark fanaticism. In the dim light he seemed to grow larger. A potent magnetism issued from him and held the listeners spellbound.

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 At the end of his discourse he swept them into a hymn.

The music, lovingly hugging the words, combined with the rankling pain of remorse and the bitterness of despair the iron clang of inevitable doom. Of its kind the hymn was a masterpiece. During the singing the simple tobacco growers and their wives, not used to spiritual stimulation, looked vaguely troubled, flustered and ill at ease.

When the hymn was over and the preacher sat down the spell was broken. Virtue seemed to have gone out of him. With all his fervor he had uttered nothing but strings of stock phrases used by every ranter about hell fire. They had heard it all before. When the glow of his personality no longer enfolded them, his listeners were left empty-minded and their thoughts reverted instantly to their own affairs, to the kitchen, the barn, and the tobacco field.

Judith did not ponder upon what the preacher had said. For her hell fire had no terrors. Her spirit was of a pagan soundness that shed such tainted superstitions as a duck's down sheds water. But she could not forget the man's darkly glowing eyes and darkly vibrant voice. Through the thick gloom as she walked home she saw the eyes burning before her, heard the voice vibrating through the fragrance of the summer night.

"Ouch!" exclaimed Hat, "if I hain't done gone an' stuck my foot into a mud hole. An' me with white stockin's on, too. Drat the durn lantern, it don't give light enough fer a flea to go to bed by."

In the same spot where it had greeted them before came a whiff from a flowering alfalfa field, not clover nor heliotrope,

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 but a mixture of the intensest sweetness of both, subtle, and disquieting.

"Say, Judy, don't you think the short feller was good lookin'? An' what was it about his eyes—an' his voice, too? I dunno—sumpin."

All the way home Hat talked about the preacher's good looks, about Luke's slovenliness, a new dress that she was making, and a sunbonnet pattern that she had made up herself out of her own head. Through her unheeded patter of talk Judith saw the strange eyes looking at her out of the darkness, heard the dark voice vibrating in the fragrance of the summer night.

On the way home Amos Crupper said to Sam Whitmarsh in his deep chest tones:

"Waal, that there was a fine sermon the young feller preached—a strong, powerful sermon. I like to listen to a good sermon an' read the news about the war. It makes a man feel like life hain't all but jes plantin' an' diggin' taters an' hoein' terbaccer."

"Yaas," agreed Uncle Sam, "sech things livens a feller up a bit an' makes him realize this life hain't all. I hearn you was needin' a buggy hoss, Amos. I got the finest little mare—dark bay—awful purty color—six year old no more, an' I'd—"

"No, Sam, she hain't fer me," Uncle Amos interrupted him smiling genially. "I knowed that there little mare when Pete Akers had her, an' I know she's twelve if she's a day an' she's had the heaves since she was little more'n a colt. You fix her up with a little dose o' birdshot to cover up them heaves an' take her to Georgetown on Court Day. You'll be able to trade her good an' mebbe put a little piece o' money in yer pocket."

On the way home Jabez Moorhouse, walking somberly alone, thought how his life had been wasted.

"I cud a made a preacher," he said to himself, "or a congressman or a jedge or learnt to play the fiddle good if I'd on'y had a chanct. But all my life I hain't done nothin' but dig

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 AULA had given orders to be wakened early the next morning, for she wanted to be on the spot when the goat-boy came. She was anxious to deal with him herself. That evening she had held a long conversation with the landlord, and had then come out of his room quite happy; so she must have planned something delightful with him.

When the goat-boy came along with his flock in the morning, Paula was already standing in front of the house, and she called out:

“Moni, can’t you sing even now?”

He shook his head. “No, I can’t. I am always wondering how much longer Mäggerli will go with me. I never can sing any more as long as I live, and here is the cross.” Whereupon he handed her a little package, for the grandmother had wrapped it carefully for him in three or four papers.

Paula took out the cross from the wrappings and examined it closely. It really was her beautiful cross with the sparkling stones, and quite unharmed.


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 in dirt. An' all the rest o' my life I'm a-goin' to keep right on a-diggin' in dirt."

He spat tobacco juice into the grass and uttered his favorite exclamation of disgust. It was a phrase of his own contriving, a rich verbal arabesque of profanity and obscenity cunningly inwrought.

Having thus partly relieved his feelings, he took a long pull from a bottle that he always carried in his pocket.

After several long pulls he felt much better and sang into the night a ballad with the oft-recurring refrain:

"You can't have my daughter without the gray mare."

On the way home Ziemer Whitmarsh overtook Abbie Gibbs, who had purposely hung behind the other members of her family, wound his arm about her slim, consumptive waist and drew her aside from the path.

On the way home Joe Barnaby and young Marsh Gibbs hesitated where a road making gang who were widening the pike to Georgetown had left their roller and other tools by the side of the road.

"D'yuh know what I spied Gus Dibble a-doin' the other day?" said Joe in a tone of infinite disgust. "I seen him a-stealin' a log chain out o' these here fixin's. What d'yuh think of a feller'd steal a log chain, hey?"

Joe himself had for many years eked out his small means by doing jobs of lumber hauling and was hence amply provided with log chains.

"I dunno," mused Marsh. "Mebbe he needed the log chain. I know I need a new shovel awful bad, an' they've riz up awful high in price since the war come on. That there long-handled one over there is jes the kind I was a-wantin'."

He looked wistfully at the shovel.

"Oh, well, of course a shovel's diff'rent," Joe hastened to assure him. "If I wanted the shovel I'd take it along 'f I'z you. The dod gasted road comp'ny kin buy more. 'Tain't like takin' anythin' off'n a neighbor."

"That's so," agreed Marsh, taking loving hold upon the handle of the shovel.

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 "The young uns lost my last pair o' pliers yestiddy," confided Joe. "I made the little buggers look everywhere fer 'em, but o' course they didn't find 'em. Hardware's awful high these days. I never knowed hardware to be so high. I reckon I'll jes slip this pair into my pocket, an' nobody'll know where they went to 'cep you an' me, hey, Marsh?"

"Sure," agreed Marsh heartily, as he shouldered the shovel. "You might's well have 'em as any other night walker. Durn careless of 'em to leave these small things lyin' about anyway. Serve 'em right if they hain't here when they come back."

When Judith crept into bed beside Jerry and closed her eyes inviting sleep, she saw the burning eyes of the evangelist looking at her out of the darkness.

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weeks before the arrival of the Evangelists, Hat had sent away a dime and a two cent stamp to certain parties who had advertised in the "Farm Wife's Friend" that for that sum they would teach you how to develop your personal magnetism and to exert it in such a way that you could control the people with whom you came in contact and make them do whatever you willed that they should do. She received in answer a typewritten letter informing her that hers had been one of the very few letters received by them which indicated beyond a doubt that the writer was a person possessed of a tremendous amount of latent magnetism, a mighty force with untold possibilities of being turned to the owner's advantage. For ordinary people the fee for further instruction was ten dollars. But for her, with her intensely interesting personality and wonderful latent power, they would make the exceptionally low rate of three dollars. For this trifling sum her special case would be taken up and studied in the minutest detail by the greatest specialists of the world, all of them congregated for this important purpose in Toledo, Ohio.

The letter brought to Hat's bosom considerable conflict of impulses. She was flattered and thrilled to know that she was the possessor of an interesting personality full of great magnetic power. In a vague way she had always suspected something of the sort. Now of course she knew for sure. She pondered upon the advantages that the use of this magnetic influence would bring. Of course her first exercise of it would be upon Luke, to make him change his socks oftener, eat less disgustingly at the table, get up first and light the fire in the morning, and chop the stove wood instead of going off and leaving it for her to do. She would also influence him to be fairer in money matters and let her have her just share of

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 what she earned and put it into a bank account in her own name. Since her marriage her disputes with Luke on the subject of the division of their money had been frequent and heated.

Having reformed Luke in this way, she was by no means sure that she would be entirely satisfied with him. She was ready to be convinced that there were nicer men in the world than Luke. Her thoughts rambled away into shadowy and devious paths, imagining lovers of many sorts. With this great power in her possession what avenue in life would be closed to her?

But three dollars! It was too much! How could she bear to take three whole dollar bills and put them into an envelope and send them away? With a two cent stamp or a dime or even both it was different. But three whole dollars! She thought of all the finery that three dollars would buy if she had a mind to spend the money on finery. She thought of all the eggs that she would have to take to Peter Akers' store to get three dollars. No, she just couldn't send away three dollars.

But the idea of having her personal magnetism developed was too fascinating a subject to be easily forgotten. She figured and pondered, almost sent the three dollars a dozen times, but could not bring herself to the final mailing of the letter.

On the day after the first revival meeting, Hat found in her mail box another letter from the cultivators of personal magnetism which fairly made her heart bleed. It began:

"Dear Harriet Wolf: If my own sister had failed to answer my letter, I could not have felt more disappointed than I was at not hearing from you. Many a night I have lain awake thinking of the tremendous power in your extremely interesting personality which is being wasted, thrown away, scattered to the idle winds."

It went on for two and a half typewritten pages in the most personal and poignant manner. Hat could hardly keep from shedding tears of mingled gratification and self-pity. She was a stranger to the devious ways of the advertising business; and the mimeographed form letter, with her own name so skilfully

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 inserted that it took a trained eye to tell it from the rest of the type, was to her a personal missive from one overflowing heart to another. Besides, the price was reduced fifty cents. For two dollars and fifty cents, if she acted quickly, she could now have her personal magnetism developed.

As she walked home from the mail box through the sweet June weather she thought of the dark eyed evangelist and of her own great undeveloped possibilities. She was stirred by a feeling that life was on the point of opening out for her. She decided to send away the money.

At home she got out the two dollars and fifty cents from a secret place in which she kept such money as she could manage, by various roundabout methods, to get out of Luke's hands, and dropped it into a jar on the clock shelf ready to buy a money order when she met the rural mail carrier next day. But by the next day her ardor had cooled to such an extent that the money looked too good to part with. She put it carefully back into the secret place.

After the second revival meeting she arrived at the conclusion that it was her duty to give a party to make the strangers feel at home.

"It looks like it's up agin me," she said to Judith, with something of the air of a martyr, "seein' nobody else hain't come forrard. O' course the fixin' an' bakin'll come kinder heavy on me, bein' as haow it's terbaccer choppin' time. So I wouldn't mind a bit if you brung along a little cake or sumpin like that to he'p me aout."

She must have thrown out the same subtle suggestion to all the invited guests, for few of the women came without a package in their hands.

The party, as seemed fitting, opened with prayer and a hymn and partook throughout of the nature of a prayer meeting. Out of respect for the preachers there was no dancing, neither were there any boisterous kissing games. The men lounged in the kitchen handy to the stove and woodbox and talked about the war. The women sat about in little groups in Hat's best room and from time to time broke the heavy silence by isolated

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 remarks about babies, sicknesses, and the best ways of rendering out hog fat. Even the men talked in subdued tones; and over everything there was a hushed atmosphere of restraint and respectful decorum. Nothing disturbed the decent calm but occasional giggles and titters from the young and unmarried who had a tendency to disappear in couples.

Hat, who entertained her guests with several songs, accompanying herself on the violin, avoided the more jaunty and jiglike airs of her repertoire and sang instead a doleful ballad of many stanzas, the gist of which is contained in the following two:

Though her voice was a bit strident and her fiddling rather noisy and vigorous for the conveying of these soft sentiments, the listeners, especially the women, seemed none the less deeply touched at the poor young woman's loss of both her man and her mansion.

As she sang she sought more than once with her bold, dark glances the magnetic eyes of the more attractive of the two preachers. Her chagrin was great and very poorly concealed when toward the close of the song about the unfortunate young lawbreaker, she saw the glance that she coveted traveling straight toward Judy Blackford who sat in a corner with her hands folded in her lap looking strangely demure and more than usually beautiful. The eye of jealousy is quicker than the eye of love to perceive beauty. Hat glared and in deep bitterness cursed the fate that had not given to herself out-

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 ward charms in keeping with her qualities of soul. She wished that she had sent away the two dollars and a half.

Out of respect for the guests of honor, very little whiskey flowed at this party. The small amount of drinking that went on was done surreptitiously from pocket flasks in the dark of the outer night. The beverage served with the cake was water.

"It's pure," Hat boasted proudly, as she passed it about in tumblers, goblets, teacups, and jelly glasses. "We got the best well this side o' Sadieville."

When the guests had washed down their pieces of stack cake with this innocent and economical drink, they began to think about going home. As Judith was tying on her sunbonnet, she glimpsed under the bed where Hat had hastily shoved them, the corners of several cakes.

"Her an' Luke'll live on stale cake fer the nex' month," she whispered to Jerry.

The two young preachers stationed themselves at the door and shook hands with all the "friends" as they passed out. And though the handshakes were a bit solemn and prayermeetinglike, they were kindly meant. When it came Judith's turn to take the hand of the preacher with the strange eyes, she felt herself hesitating. Then, having given him her hand, she withdrew it hurriedly and passed out. She felt Hat's searching eyes fastened upon her. Her fingers tingled and her heart thumped as she climbed into the cart and sat down beside Jerry. She was glad of the darkness, for she knew that her cheeks were in a flame.

A compelling fascination lured her again and again to the revival meetings. There through the meaningless droning of the prayers, the wail of the hymns and the exhortations of the evangelists, she sat in a half hypnotized state conscious only of a pair of darkly burning eyes, a darkly vibrating voice. Not once but many times during the service her fascinated gaze met that of the preacher and swerved from it, confused and abashed. Once, by an effort of will, she met his look with her own dark, level gaze and did not turn her eyes aside. He

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 started and turned abruptly away; and in the dim light she thought she saw a dark red flush pass across his face.

Having found that she had this power, she was constantly prodded by the urge to exercise it. She knew nothing about self-discipline. All her life she had known no guide but her impulses. Now as always she followed where they pointed. It was not mere coquetry, but an irresistible force stronger than herself that made her dart her level, penetrating glance like a keen sword into the dark turmoil of the evangelist's smoldering eyes. He winced as if the sword had pierced him. Through her temples the blood pounded tumultuously. She was seized with a delirious, half frenzied joy. She held her breath so that she would not scream. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Hat.

Once they sang an old fashioned hymn, now rarely heard in churches:

When the evangelist sang he gave his whole soul to the singing. His breast heaved with more than the expansion of his lungs. His strange eyes dilated and burned. An aura of ecstasy welled out from him. He was a man transfigured and beyond himself. The tune, unutterably wistful and rich with passionate longing, surged through the little room. With music, the only tongue that can voice passion, it spoke mightily to the two who had ears to hear. It throbbed in Judith's temples, in her heart, in all the arteries of her body. Irresistibly she sought the eyes of the evangelist. This time he did not turn away. A shaft of dark fire reached out to her from his

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 transfigured face, bold, compelling, and masterful; and it was she who with a hot blush dropped her gaze to the floor. By a lucky chance Hat was not there that night.

In the darkness of the summer night he overtook her on the way home. All the way she had been listening for him. She knew that he would come. He came up with her where the alfalfa field spilled its subtle fragrance into the warm night air. His arms about her were strong and imperative. His hands were hot. His kissing mouth was insatiable. With an ecstasy transcending anything that she had ever felt in her life, she yielded herself to his passion.

She moved through the succeeding weeks in an unquiet trance, treading not upon hard earth, but upon some substance infinitely buoyant and elastic. She scarcely knew that she washed and milked and churned and worked over butter, that she cooked and swept and hoed in the garden and dressed and fed the children. She performed these tasks as one drives a horse through a pitch black night, leaving the lines slack and letting the animal feel his way. Her body, well broken to household routine, went forward by itself without guidance of the mind. From daylong labors done in this way she came forth strangely fresh and unwearied.

Always she was intensely conscious of her body, deliciously aware of the roundness of her arms, the softness and whiteness of her breasts, the slim grace of her ankles. Never before had she given such things more than a passing thought. In other times when she had thought about the appearance of her body it had been in relation to new dresses. Now the beauty of her body lived and moved with her continually, a part of her consciousness. She gazed long into the little looking glass at her cheeks, radiant with a warm flush, her eyes softly luminous. Something of the cool, level quality had gone out of the eyes leaving a deep radiance. Looking into the glass she laughed little soft, shivery laughs and felt the blood rise tingling into her cheeks.

Sitting on the doorstep to peel potatoes or shell peas, she

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 stretched her slim, brown, bare feet out into the sunshine and looked at them with eyes that saw their beauty. She twisted a strand of her lustrous black hair about her finger, made it into a glittering curl and dangled it in the sunlight with a foolish little laugh.

In the yard not far from the kitchen door stood a rose bush, a poor, battered, stunted thing, scratched and nipped by the hens and broken back again and again by straying hogs and calves. Nothing was left of it but a few spiny stalks almost denuded of leaves. On one of these stalks she had noticed a red bud swelling.

One morning when she came to the door she saw that the bud had blossomed into a rose, not a frail pink blossom, but a silken, scarlet thing with a great, gold heart, heavy with dew and fragrance. Gorgeously it flaunted on its distorted stem. Against the drabness of the dooryard, now bare with summer drought, it flamed rich and vivid. She knelt on the ground beside the rose and smelled of its perfume. Inhaling the fragrance and looking into the deep richness of the scarlet leaves, she felt carried beyond herself with a great uplifting of the heart. Tears from some strange, hidden source welled into her eyes.

After its one rose had shed its leaves, the little bush, discouraged by the drought and the continual pecking of the hens, dried up and leveled itself with the ground.

Fearful of shrewd looks and whispering tongues, she did not go often to the meetings. They had other places of rendezvous. One was a deep hollow pungent with the smell of mint, where the creek splashed over moss covered stones and a weeping willow trailed its gray leaves in the water. Here on the hottest July afternoon the overhanging boughs of many trees and saplings made a green coolness. The place seemed remote as a cave until one day Uncle Jonah Cobb came along the little cowpath that bordered the creek. They heard him pushing aside the branches that grew across the unfrequented path and had time to dive back into the underbrush. Half blind and more than half deaf, he took his slow way through

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 their little bower and, like an old ox whose neck bends by second nature to the yoke, never once lifted his head.

"I wonder was Uncle Jonah ever young?" she whispered, when he was safely out of hearing.

After that she would never go there again. The place seemed as open as a public square, as bare to the world as a housetop. She could never think of it without seeing Uncle Jonah plodding through it, his eyes fixed on the ground, a long blue patch on the back of his gray shirt, his denim trousers, much too large for him, hitched half way up his back by his greasy galluses.

Hemmed in between two steep hills and smothered in brush that had grown up about it was the shell of an old shanty that had been forsaken of man as long as Judith could remember. Near it was neither wagon track nor cowpath. Nobody ever came that way. On the floor, streaked and stained by many rains, they made themselves a resting place of cedar boughs and last year's leaves.

Mocking birds had built that year in the locust trees by the horsepond. How many she did not know. Perhaps there was only a pair or two, but it sounded like a dozen. She could see their pert little gray and white bodies darting about in the branches. Sometimes one of them would perch on a fence rail or the rooftree of the smokehouse and flirt his long tail saucily as he preened his feathers. These little choir boys to Pan, in whose small bodies the spark of life burned with such an intense flame, who lived only to love and to sing, kept the air vibrant almost all day long with their insistent, soul disturbing melodies. For a few hours the noonday sun lulled them into luxurious rest and a deep quiet fell, treacherously haunted by erotic echoes. The meadow larks that sang over and over again at regular intervals their one slender ripple of song were with their few guileless notes like poor little parlor singers beside these great masters of bird opera. There was no sound in the language of birds that they could not make. They chirped, chirred, trilled, twittered, caroled, ran again and again through all the scales a bird's voice ever compassed. Just to show what they could do, they imitated with perfection of accuracy the

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 song of the finch, the robin, the meadow lark. Then, soaring far beyond the compass of these humble singers, burst forth rapturously into such floods of melody that the sunlight seemed filled with a rain of bright jewels. With delirious abandon to love and joy, the music welled from their little throats, palpitatingly, delicate, piercingly sweet. The enraptured rush of it, the sudden turns of it, the mad surprises of it penetrated Judith's being and swayed her like the master passion of which they were the voice.

They did not often sing in the night. But once a wakeful wooer sat on the ridgepole of the smokehouse and poured into the white moonlight floods of wild melody. For a long time Judith stood at the window looking out at the dim sky with scarcely a star showing and the world lying blanched and black under the light of the full moon. The locust trees by the horsepond looked dark and mysterious. The shadow of the smokehouse gable lay sharp and black against the whiteness of the yard. On the ridgepole she could just distinguish the little dark speck whose music thrilled the night. She leaned her head on the window sill and felt herself melting, dissolving away into music and moonlight.

All at once the bird stopped singing and a silence fell like the hush before doom. She shivered in her thin nightgown and crept back into bed. Sobs were rising in her throat. She tried to stifle them in the pillow; but her whole body shook in the grip of the hysteria.

Jerry stirred uneasily in his heavy sleep of exhaustion.

"Don't cry, Judy," he murmured sleepily, winding his arm about her. "Things'll come out all right."

It was blackberry season and she had a good excuse for leaving the children with Aunt Selina. Aunt Selina was genuinely glad to have them. Like most other back country women she was ready with glib lies to suit any occasion. But Judith knew that she was not lying when she said: "Fetch 'em over soon agin, Judy, the little darlin's." The old woman dearly loved the company of children. She chirruped and twittered to the baby and prattled in an unending stream to

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Rh 25. He, fourthly, quotes two extraordinary texts of Vyasu, as prohibiting the disposal, by a single parcener, of his share in the immoveables, under the notion that each parcener has his property in the whole estate jointly possessed. These texts are as follow: “A single parcener may not, without consent of the rest, make a sale or gift of the whole immoveable estate, nor of what is common to the family.” “Separated kinsmen, as those who are unseparated, are equal in respect of immoveables: for one has not power over the whole, to give, mortgage, or sell it.” Upon which the author, of the Dayubhagu remarks, Ch. II. Sec. 27:) “It shrouldshould [sic] not be alleged that by the texts of VaysuVyasu [sic] one person has not power to make a sale, or other transfer of such property. For here also (in the very instance of land held in common) as in the case of other goods, there equally exists a property consisting in the power of disposal at pleasure.” That is, a partner has, in common with the rest, an undisputed property existing either in the whole of the moveables and immoveables, or in an undivided portion of them; he, therefore, should not be, or cannot be, prevented from executing, at his pleasure, a transfer of his right to another by a sale, gift, or mortgage of it.

26. In reply to the question, what might be the consequence of disregard to the prohibition conveyed by the above texts of Vyasu? the author says: “But the texts of Vyasu exhibiting a prohibitonprohibition [sic], are intended to shew a moral offence; since the family is distressed by a sale, gift or other transfer, which argues a dispositoindisposition [sic] in the person to make an ill use of his power as owner. They are not meant to invalidate the sale or other transfer." (Ch. II. Sec. 28). A partner is as completely a legal


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 the two boys as they followed her about while she fed the chickens and tended the rabbits and hoed the cabbages and the rows of beans. She loved to put cookies into their chubby little grimy hands and twists of sugared popcorn in the pockets of their overalls. She had a sweet tooth herself, so she nearly always had such things about the house. They were near of an age, all four, and happy together.

He would meet her on the edges of the pasture slopes where the blackberries grew and help her fill her tin bucket with the large, juicy berries. Here in the embrace of the sun the earth swooned with midsummer heat. Bees drowsed over the patches of steeplebush. Here and there tall stately stalks of ironweed lifted their great crowns of royal purple. The scent of flowering milkweed distilled out into the hot sunshine was heavy and sweet. Heavier and sweeter was the smell of purple alfalfa blossoms blown across the pasture in warm whiffs.

As they strayed about over the close cropped grass among the brambles and dock and patches of steeplebush, they spoke to each other scarcely at all. Only sometimes when he came beside her, he gripped her hand in his which was strong and dark. When the berry bucket was full he drew her unresistingly down between the steep hills to the old shanty.

Through these hot summer weeks she felt small need of sleep. When in the half light of the early morning she and Jerry took their milk buckets and went through the yard to the cowlot, she felt awake, alive, a creature of the morning. She thrilled to the feeling of newness, of life born again, that stirs through a summer dawn.

As the summer advanced, an uneasiness that was something other than erotic unrest began to assail her. She tried to dismiss it, to ignore its existence, to lose herself in the old preoccupations. Untiring as a weasel intent upon the blood of chickens, it kept coming back upon her with stealthy persistence. She knew that it was trying to awaken her from her dream. She did not want to be awakened; yet more and more surely she realized that the waking hour was at hand. When she looked into her mirror she met a cool, level gaze looking

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 calmly out at her through radiance that was growing dim. The blood no longer rose warmly into her cheeks.

At first the dark-eyed stranger had power to charm away this disquieting intruder and bring the dream back. For this she sought him out at all times and places, unmindful of the tongue of slander, forgetting prudence, forgetting everything but the desire to be kept within her dream. He felt gratified at first, as a man is gratified by evidence of his power to attract. Then, fearing whither her recklessness might lead, tormented too by fears and dark conflicts that were an outgrowth of his nature, but had no part in hers, he tried to show her the folly of her lack of discretion. When he began to do this she was filled with bitter contempt for what she called his cowardice. She looked at him grimly, with a hard light in her eyes, and knew that she must surely awaken.

She began to go less often to look for berries; and the little shanty between the hills saw them more and more rarely. When they met in the pasture lands she was sullen and irritable. He too gloomed and grouched.

One day when she saw him coming toward her in the blackberry patch, her eyes instead of seeking his fell upon the lower part of his face. It was not a bad face as the faces of men go; but of a sudden it seemed to her revoltingly stupid, sullen, and almost bestial. She restrained a mad impulse to fling out her arm and slap it with the back of her hand.

The blackberry season was nearly over, and the berries were becoming few and scattered. They ranged far searching for the luscious fruit. She kept as far away from him as she could. Something about his presence seemed to make the air stuffy.

He picked into a little folding cup that he was in the habit of carrying in his pocket. When he brought the cup full of berries and emptied it into her bucket, she looked at him with cold, sardonic eyes.

When the bucket was half full she took it resolutely on her arm.

"You don't need fer to pick no more," she said coldly. "I'm a-goin' back home naow."

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 He looked at her at first beseechingly. Then a look of relief spread over his features.

"It's best so," he muttered huskily. But he turned and walked beside her.

"Fall'll soon be a-comin' on," she said. "See that there maple branch is red a'ready. That there one big branch allus turns red in August, long afore the others."

He quoted from one of his hymns:

She was mastered by a cruel desire to make him suffer.

"I shouldn't reckon Jesus'd invite you," she scoffed, "after the way you bin a-actin'. Hain't you askairt you'll roast in hell fire forever for the way you bin a-doin'? An' you with the face to keep on standin' up an' preachin' diff'rent all the time!"

He started violently, as though she had thrust a knife into him where it could hurt the most. The struggling demons of lust and religious fanaticism that made for themselves a battle ground of his wretched body and spirit looked at her out of his darkly smoldering eyes. It was a look to call forth pity. But she was not in a mood to feel pity.

"God forgive me and save me from you," he groaned, covering his face with his hands, "you scarlet woman!"

She laughed derisively.

"Huh, I reckon I hain't no scarleter'n what you air. An' anyhaow I don't feel scarlet, an' you do. I don't do things I'm ashamed o' doin', an' I hain't a bit askairt o' hell fire neither."

He turned and fled away from this monstrous creature, this cold and sinful woman who knew neither fear nor shame.

She laughed a mocking laugh; then turned toward him suddenly, overpowered with deep disgust.

"I couldn't stummick to swaller the dirty berries you picked,"

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 she called out, and threw the berries after him, with the swift motion of a spiteful little quarreling schoolchild. Then she walked away and never once looked back.

For weeks she had been struggling against this unseen force that she knew was trying to awaken her from her dream. She had been edging away from the thought of waking, shivering with apprehension. Now that she knew herself broad awake, she felt of a sudden glad, bold, and strong. A sense of freedom, of relief from some clinging burden that had grown clogged and foul, passed through her like a strong wind that scatters cobwebs and made her breath deep and lift her head high in the sunlight. Swinging the empty bucket with happy abandon, as a child its dinner pail, she strode with long, free steps across the pasture and along the ridge road, delighting in the sun and the sweet air, feeling clean, sound, and whole, her mind untroubled by regrets, unsullied by the slightest tinge of self-abasement.

In Aunt Selina's clean-swept dooryard she called for the children and went on toward home walking like some primal savage woman with movements scarcely less strong and free for the weight of the baby on her arm. The boys, half carrying, half dragging the empty bucket, frolicked about her in circles.

At supper that night she looked about at her family as though she were seeing them for the first time after an absence. As is usual after absence, she liked them all better, felt more kindly disposed toward them and more solicitous for their welfare. Also she saw them more clearly as with the eyes of a stranger.

The boys, greedily devouring their milk and corn cakes and champing valiantly up and down ears of green corn that she had boiled for supper, were hale and ruddy little fellows. But on their baby faces she saw already appearing traces of a look that she had learned to dread, a look that stamps itself upon the faces of those who for generations have tilled the soil in solitude, a heavy, settled, unexpectant look. It seemed

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 cruel that such a look should come upon the faces of little boys long even before their time for doing barn chores. Looking at them she was filled with a vague unhappiness.

When she turned from the boys to the little girl she felt a more poignant sting. Annie was the kind of little girl one sees often in country places and very rarely in towns. She had a puny, colorless, young-old face, drab hair thin and fine, that hung in little straight wisps about her cheeks, a mouth scarcely different in color from the rest of the face, and blank, slate-colored eyes. There was neither depth nor clearness in the little eyes, no play of light and shade, no sparkle of mirth or mischief, no flash of anger, nothing but a dead, even slate color. They were always the same. In their blank, impenetrable gaze they held the accumulated patience of centuries. Looking into these calm little eyes, Judith shrank and shuddered.

At the other end of the table Jerry sat and swilled down numberless cups of strong coffee. When she looked at him she was startled to see the creased hollows under his eyes and the heavy look of toilworn despondence that merged his features into a dull sameness. With a sharp stab of pain she realized that before her eyes he was turning from a boy into an old man. He ate and drank soddenly, bestially, without lifting his eyes, his head sunk between his shoulders. He was beginning to talk in grunts, like old Andy, his father. When after supper he walked across the floor to get a broom straw to pick his teeth, he lurched in his weariness like a drunken man. His legs were bent at the knees, his step in his great plowing boots heavy and dragging.

When she came beside him to put more fried meat on his plate, she let her hand rest upon his shoulder with a caressing touch. He looked up at her quickly, his features suddenly brightened by a smile of surprised pleasure at this unexpected token of her affection. Something about the smile smote her cruelly, something pitiful and heartrending. She felt that she could not bear it. She made haste to go to the smokehouse for another piece of meat; and there amid the hanging sides and

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 shoulders she shuddered convulsively, clenched her hands, and bit into her under lip, struggling against tears.

In the night a strong wind sprang up and the sky grew overcast. In the blackness she lay awake feeling the house rock in the gusts, listening to the rattle of window sashes, the uneasy creaking of doors, the flapping of loose shingles on the roof. A broken molasses jug lying under the edge of the house, caught the wind in its funnel and whistled eerily. The shed door swung on its hinges and banged intermittently as the gusts of wind slammed it violently shut. From time to time a rat scampered the length of the loft over her head.

The baby in the cradle by the bedside, also lying awake, talked to herself, making soft, cooing little noises, delicate little purling sounds as sweet as flower petals. Jerry slept heavily.

Lying between her husband and child, she felt alone, cold and dismal, alone yet inextricably bound to them by something stronger than their bonds of common misery. Their future lives stretched before her dull, drab and dreary, and there was nothing at the end but the grave. She began to cry into the pillow, repressing her sobs so as not to wake Jerry. For a long time she cried in a stifled, bitter, despairing way. As she wept the baby's babblings ceased and she fell into the sleep that in puny children seems closely akin to death. Toward morning Judith, too, fell mercifully asleep, pale from tears and bitter thoughts; and when the ghostlike dawn peered into the little window it saw them all three lying stretched out stark and pallid like corpses.

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September the thing she had begun to dread happened. She found herself with child. To her bodily misery and disgust were added a misery and disgust more deeply seated, more hateful and appalling. How could she bear to bring this child into the world? How could she keep her mouth shut and allow Jerry to accept it as his? The whole thing was too horrible and monstrous to think about. And yet she must think about it. She must find some way to keep it from happening.

She was informed now about many things of which she had been ignorant when her first child was born. She had listened to the whispered confidences of other women and from their dark hints had learned that unwilling mothers had sometimes succeeded in doing what she now felt that she must do. Hitherto a powerful physical revulsion had prevented her from trying to interfere with nature in its course. Pain had always terrorized and maddened her; and from the idea of self-inflicted pain she shrank like a child. From the thought of such an instrument as a knitting needle her flesh writhed away as if the needle were heated white for torture.

Now, however, in the extremity of her need, she forced herself to think calmly of a knitting needle. She found one half buried in a crack of the cupboard drawer, hidden away under a frowsy accumulation of tangled scraps of twine, half empty spools, rusted fishhooks, odd washers, screws and nails, and crumpled grocery bills. Having pried it out with a hairpin, she laid it away in a safe place to be ready against the time when she could summon courage to try to use it.

There was another method, for her much less repugnant, which she decided to try first. She waited and watched for an opportunity.

One day Elmer, who had come over to give Jerry a hand with the tobacco cutting, left Pete, the chestnut mule, tied in

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Hayne J Crennan J Kiefel J

rejected the conclusion reached by Basten JA that the trial judge's conduct tended to undermine the routine directions given at the commencement of the trial and cast doubt on whether it could be presumed that the jury would follow the judge's instructions.

In his evidence to the Court of Criminal Appeal, Mr Cesan complained that he found the judge's conduct, when he was giving evidence at trial, to have been disruptive, but the majority put this complaint aside as being "general in expression" and not accompanied by any attempt to identify any error in, or omission from, the evidence which Mr Cesan gave at his trial.

All members of the Court of Criminal Appeal accepted that, as Grove J put it, "the probability [was] that, from time to time, the judge was 'nodding off' and on other occasions, notably when he was heard to snore, was asleep in a real and practical sense". And all members of the Court of Criminal Appeal accepted the evidence of Mr Cesan that, during his cross-examination, the trial judge was heard to snore and that, as a result, some members of the jury "were looking at the judge and not [Mr Cesan] or the prosecutor" and that some "looked surprised and others were smiling".

The importance of the evidence given in the Court of Criminal Appeal by Mr Cesan was that it showed that during the cross-examination of one of the two accused on trial at least some members of the jury were not paying attention to the evidence being given. And the findings made by all members of the Court of Criminal Appeal showed that the distraction that occurred during Mr Cesan's cross-examination was probably no isolated incident. There were other substantial periods of time during the trial when the trial judge was asleep and it follows, as Basten JA rightly concluded, that it is probable that the attention of

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 the shed. Pete was no mere plow mule. He had fire and spirit. The men had taken their lunches with them to the field and would not be back before night. After she had washed up the breakfast dishes and swept the kitchen, she put clean things on the children and took them over to Aunt Selina's.

"I gotta go to mill," she explained, "an' git a sack o' corn graound up. I didn't know we was so near out o' meal till I come to mix up the cakes this mornin'."

When she got home again she saddled and bridled Pete and, stepping with some diffidence into the saddle, turned the mule's head toward the road.

It was years since she had ridden horseback; and for the first few moments she felt awkward and perilously poised. Then the familiar undulation of the animal's flanks under her and the old feel of the lines in her hands restored her confidence; and all at once, as if a good fairy had breathed new life into her, she felt her spirits rise and began to realize the September morning, clear, blue, and sparkling, the caress of wind and sun, the exhilaration of change and motion.

Out on the pike she urged Pete into a gallop and passed Aunt Eppie's house riding like the Wild Huntsman, her old red cotton sweater flying out behind.

Cissy, hearing the beat of the mule's hoofs, ran excitedly to the kitchen window.

"Well, if there hain't Judy Pippinger a-gallopin' past like mad on her dad's mule, her hair a-blowin' out jes like she used to ride when she was a little gal. What's fetched her away from home, I wonder?"

All along the road she drew similar comments from the neighbors who were fortunate enough to live on the pike. The conclusion generally arrived at was that only urgent need of the doctor could satisfactorily explain her appearance. Otherwise it was an unheard of and hence unseemly thing for a married woman the mother of three children to be seen out alone on horseback and going at breakneck speed. But then, after all the things that had been whispered about her, anything might be expected of Judy Pippinger.

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 Unmindful of the prying looks cast after her from stuffy kitchens, Judith galloped on, feeling as light as a puff of thistledown blown through the September morning.

When the first wild exhilaration of the ride had spent itself and she became aware that Pete was sweating and breathing hard, she pulled the mule down to an easy trot and turned him from the pike onto a grass grown wagon track that wound in and out at the foot of gently sloping hills.

It was such a peaceful, meandering, sleepy, sun-steeped wagon track that before she knew it she had let the lines drop along the mule's neck, and she and Pete were lazing along in the sunshine like two natural born loafers as though there never had been and never would be a furrow to plow or a floor to scrub. Since the day when she had fled from Jerry's tub of hog guts, she had never been away from the house in the morning. Yet now the hundreds of dreary mornings spent in the stuffy clutter of the kitchen fell away into unreality like a dream and she was a girl again, free to come and go as she liked, happy and careless.

The grass grown wagon track, bordered by golden rod and sprays of little purple asters, dozed so sweetly and calmly in the sun that it seemed removed by the width of the world from human filth and fret. Soon, however, it wound around a curve where there was a gap between the hills and she could look out over acres of alfalfa, fields of corn and tobacco and the shanties and pigsties of those who tilled them. In the middle distance she saw three men cutting tobacco, going along the rows with the precision of machines. How small they looked to her eyes.

In another field she saw men cutting corn and stacking it in shocks. In the spaces where they had cut the scattered pumpkins appeared bright and golden. The whole made a pretty picture to look at. But she knew that now in the noonday heat the men's arms and backs were aching and the sweat pouring from their faces as they worked.

Over a bluegrass pasture cattle and sheep browsed. They were at ease and at peace among themselves. Three young colts

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 raced up and down in an alfalfa field, brimming with health and the joy of life.

In the dooryard of a shanty not far away a frowsy woman was chopping wood. In another dooryard another woman was frantically chasing a pig that had broken out of its pen. Her long slatternly skirt tried to trip her as she ran. She heard the wail of a baby and the harsh scream of an older child, followed by the still harsher-toned reprimand of the harassed mother. A skinny-armed girl, little more than a child, with a long flaxen pigtail down her back, was rubbing out clothes at a washtub by the door.

Seated easily on the mule's back and commanding with her eyes the wide stretch of country, she indulged for a moment in the dark fancy that she was God looking out upon these poor children that he had made in his own image and condemned to a life of toilsome grubbing in the dirt that ended only with the grave. Then a flood of the old nausea swept over her and with it a terror and she faced the abysmal truth that she was not God, but only one of these pitiful, groveling creatures, doomed to the same existence and the same end.

She turned the mule's head and rode toward home slowly and dejectedly. From time to time, mindful of the purpose for which she had come, she tried to urge him into a gallop, to make him take a fence or a ditch. But Pete was tired and his rider's hand had grown listless. She felt herself overcome by a great weariness of all things.

By the time she reached home in the late afternoon, the whole neighborhood knew that she had been out and just how long she had been out. And having satisfied themselves that there was no sickness in the family, the women drew their own conclusions.

When she had given up hope that the ride was going to have any effect, she forced herself to try to use the knitting needle. But she was shrinking and clumsy, and at the first stab of pain she flung the instrument violently to the other end of the room. Afterward she dropped it through a wide crack in the kitchen floor so that she would not be able to find it again.

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 She searched out pennyroyal and tansy and other noxious herbs in the places where she knew they grew, and took to brewing nasty smelling decoctions over the stove and sipping gingerly at the brackish liquor she poured off from them. But all that these evil brews did was to increase her sickness and lassitude. Drearily she shambled about the kitchen through the dragging days and felt too sick and weary for despair.

One night in late October she woke from her first sleep with a mind preternaturally wide awake. Free for the moment from the nausea and dragging weariness of the day, she was left bare to the attacks of the things that prey upon the mind. It was raining in a fine, slow, steady downpour, and she lay listening to the patter of the drops on the roof, looking blankly at the dimly outlined oblong that was the window. At such times the numberless trivialities that clutter the day are sunk into insignificance, leaving the path to the grave straight and plain.

What real difference did it make after all whether the baby was born and lived to be a hundred or died in the womb?

Nevertheless, the moment after she had asked herself this question, she got out of bed and moving cautiously so as not to waken Jerry gathered together her clothes in the darkness and slipped with them into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. She dressed hastily and without putting on shoes or stockings, jacket or sunbonnet, stepped out into the rainy night.

She shivered and hesitated as the first cold drops fell on her shoulders through her thin cotton dress. But the next moment she plunged out boldly straight across the swimming mud and filth of the cowlot. The moon, far in its third quarter, gave only a feeble glimmer of light from behind the clouds, but it was enough to guide her to the horsepond, which was deep and full from recent heavy rains. There was no slackening of her steps as she came near the tawny pool, but rather an increase of speed; and when she reached the edge she flung herself instantly into the water and disappeared as inconsequentially as if she had been a stone or a clod of dung.

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 She came up swimming. She had forgotten that she knew how to swim. She had not been in the water since she was twelve years old. Yet now she swam, vigorously and toward the bank. Even above humiliation and despair there rose in her a sense of power and triumph as she realized that she was master of the water.

Her long arms rising alternately above the muddy smoothness brought her in a few strokes close to the bank. When she was within a few feet of it she remembered suddenly that she had not come to the horsepond to take a swim. She relaxed her body and tried hard to sink. The next moment her feet touched the slimy ooze of the bottom and she saw that the water was not above her shoulders. Standing there breast high in the muddy water with the ooze welling up between her toes, she caught herself thinking that she was glad she had not put on her shoes, which were nearly new. Suddenly she began to laugh, wildly, hysterically into the rainy night.

As she waded to the bank, still laughing insanely, she cut her foot on some sharp object that lay at the bottom of the pond, a piece of old stovepipe perhaps or a broken bottle. She gave a sharp scream of pain, then laughed again.

But when she had climbed up the slippery incline of mud and crouched on the wet ground in the rain there was no hysteria left. Slow tears of misery and despair welled into her eyes.

She thought of trying once more. But what would be the use, she told herself dejectedly. She would only wade out again.

She began to shake with cold. Shiver after shiver passed through her and her teeth chattered. All at once she felt as if she had never been so cold in all her life. Still she crouched shuddering on the soggy ground and hugged herself in a vain attempt to get warm.

At last she got up and plodded slowly back to the house that she had thought never to see again. There she squeezed the water out of her hair and rubbed herself dry, piled her clothes in a dripping heap on the porch and turned the washtub over

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 them and crept miserably into bed. Jerry stirred in his sleep, turned over and wound one arm around her, as his habit was. From the comfort of his warm body and circling arm peace came to her and she fell asleep.

The next morning the Slatten boys butchered a hog. Aunt Maggie Slatten, coming over in the late afternoon to borrow the Blackford sausage grinder, found Judith writhing and screaming on the bed. The two boys were standing solemnly by the bedside looking at their mother with scared eyes. The baby, not aware that anything was wrong, crept about the floor. She had been dabbling deliciously in the slop pail and her face and hands were smeared with its contents. The unwashed dinner dishes were still on the table, the floor was scattered with many things; and some washing that had been brought in from the line was piled in a heap in the rocking chair.

Aunt Maggie's experienced eye took in the situation at a glance. She sent Billy back to her place with the sausage grinder. Then she set about doing the things she knew to be necessary. She made up a fire and heated water. She put hot flatirons to Judith's feet and hot stovelids to her back. She rummaged around among the drawers and cupboards for sheets and old cloths, and did not neglect her opportunity to peer curiously and critically into all the household arrangements. When Jerry came home she sent him out to chop up more wood so that the fire could keep going all night. And when at last the struggle was over and Judith lay white and semi-conscious, she fixed her up as clean as she could, swept and straightened the house, plunged quantities of blood-soaked clothes into a tub of water on the porch and helped Jerry to get together something for them to eat. Jerry wanted to sit up; but she waved him aside, bent upon doing her whole duty. When the others were in bed she made herself comfortable in the old rocking chair and dozed till morning.

Not a word did she utter to the sick woman of inquiry or reproach. But the next day, talking privately with Aunt Sally Whitmarsh by the kitchen stove, with the door into the bed-

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 room closed, her tongue was loosened and she billowed with self-righteousness and the joy of scandal.

"You'd never bring yerse'f to believe it, Sally, the state I found things in," she said in low but impressive tones. "O' course I fell right to an' done everything I could. Judy Pippinger hain't never acted none too neighborly to me; but jes the same I aim to do allus like I'd be done by, an' Jerry says he'll haul the boys' terbaccer fer what I done fer Judy. It pays to treat yer neighbor right, Sally.

"I sez to her, sez I, 'A sow when she's a-fixin' to farrow finds herse'f a bed. Anybody'd think you'd make out to be clean as a hawg, anyway.'

"She looks up at me with them big black eyes o' hern.

Haow did I know this was a-comin' on me?' she whines fretful like. 'It come on all of a suddent when I was a-fixin' to gether up the dishes.'

Mebbe it did,' I sez, 'an' mebbe it didn't. But I got a notion you bin kinder lookin' fer it right along.' An' I looks right at her, cool, an' meaningful. She never said a word to that, but turned her face araound to the wall."

"Well, Judy was allus a wild young un an' a wild gal," said Aunt Sally, glancing cautiously at the bedroom door, "but I didn't hardly think she'd ever come to sech a pass as this." Then, lowering her voice to a scandalized whisper: "The talk that went araound about her an' the preacher in the summer was a disgrace. He wa'n't helpin' her pick blackberries fer nothin'."

"Yaas, an' this here's what's come of it, if I hain't much mistaken," said Aunt Maggie, setting her thin lips together with grim satisfaction.

"An' 'tain't as if Judy'd ever had anything to complain about," continued Aunt Sally, smoothing the piece of patchwork over her knee. "She's got three nice chillun an' the best man that ever worked his hands to the bone fer a woman."

"You've spoke the truth there, Sally. There hain't a steadier man than Jerry Blackford this side o' Georgetown. He don't drink, he don't hunt an' he don't idle his time away.

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 He's done everything a man kin do fer that woman. An' that's the thanks he gits fer it. Trouble with Judy, she dunno what she does want."

"I reckon not. If she had to put up with the things some wimmin has, she might have sumpin to complain about."

"Yaas, if he spent every cent on whiskey an' come home drunk an' blacked her eyes, like Teenie Pooler's man."

"Or run after every petticoat he saw, like Lambert Patton."

"Or went flighty, like Melvin Brewer, so's you couldn't know what he might be a-goin' to do with the butcher knife."

Aunt Maggie could have bitten off her tongue before the last speech was out of her mouth. It slipped out before she remembered to whom she was talking. She had not meant to encroach upon the sanctity of her listener's family skeleton.

Aunt Sally Whitmarsh's placid features did not alter in the least. But Aunt Maggie knew by a subtle change of atmosphere that her breach of the rules of conversation had not slipped by unnoticed.

"It's purty weather naow; but it'll likely rain agin to-night," said Aunt Sally, looking out of the window.

Later in the afternoon, Jabez Moorhouse pushed open the kitchen door. Nobody was there but the baby taking a nap in her crib. After a moment the door into the bedroom opened and Aunt Sally stood holding the knob in her hand.

"Howdy, Aunt Sally. I bin over to Gibbses' place grindin' up some tools, an' they told me Judy was took sick. Could I step in an' see her a minute?"

Aunt Sally hesitated and looked at him coldly. It was not the custom in Scott County for men who were no relation to be admitted to the bedsides of sick women.

"He'd better be off about his work, the idle loafer," she said to herself. But aloud she said, "She's a-feelin' pretty poorly," and held the door gingerly open for him to pass through.

He had come into the house from the midst of a blue October afternoon, still, sweet, and sunny, and with just enough freshness of chill in the air to make one take deep breaths and step lightly along and whistle the end of a tune. He

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 passed into a room where the air was chokingly hot and heavy with the smell of sickness and of many breaths. The one small window was tightly closed; and the green paper blind, full of white creases and pinholes, was drawn three quarters down.

Aunt Abigail sat knitting on one side of the bed. On the other side Aunt Maggie Slatten dozed ponderously in the rocking chair. She wakened as Jabez came into the room and sat bolt upright looking at him with eyes full of hostility.

Aunt Sally, after dropping some more pieces of wood into the little sheet iron stove, came and resumed her seat on Aunt Abigail's side of the bed. She was nearest to the window and she had in her lap a bit of patchwork that she was piecing together.

In the middle of the big bed, Judith's face was very white in its frame of black hair. Her thin body hardly raised the patchwork quilt. Heavy and somber the tall walnut headboard rose behind her. In her wasted youth she looked more ready for the grave than any of the old duennas about her. As Jabez looked he had a vision of her as he had seen her how few years before in the walnut bed, fresh, gay, and rosy after the birth of her first child.

She opened her eyes as he came toward her and greeted him with a shadow of the old flashing smile.

The three old women glanced at each other with meaningful looks. After all they had done for her, she had not smiled once for them.

"Waal, Judy," was all he could say, as he stood awkwardly by the bed, his cap in his hands. The darkness oppressed him, the stinking heat of the room made his eyeballs ache. He felt the three pairs of vixenish old eyes fastened upon him with dark suspicion and cold hostility.

"Waal, Judy, I hope you'll git well right quick," he said after an awkward pause and turned and went out of the house. As he passed over the ridge and down on the other side, he neither whistled nor sang, and the weight of his great shoulders seemed to be dragging them to the earth.

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she was able to be up and around again, she began to be possessed by a great dread and loathing of the thought of the coming on of winter.

One late afternoon in early December, when the thick mud and heavy skies of winter had laid hold upon the country, Jerry came into the kitchen carrying a crooked nail covered with blood and rust.

"Looky here, Judy, what I took out'n the side o' Nip's leg. The damn fool hoss'd done gone an' laid hisse'f daown on it. It was in near up to the head. Where's the turpentine?"

"My, it's an ugly lookin' one. Jes thick with rust, hain't it?" she said, as she rummaged for the turpentine. "Some heats the nail red hot an' sticks it back into the hole."

"I know, but I kinder hate to do it. I'll soak it well with turpentine an' that'd otta fix it. I can't fer the life of me see haow so many old boards with nails stickin' up in 'em gits laid about in the barnyard. All the time I keep pickin' 'em up, more keeps a-comin'. It looks like they growed there. Is that the turpentine? Give it here. The quicker I git it in the better."

He went out, slamming the door violently in his haste.

The wound healed over and Jerry had almost forgotten to worry about it, when about ten days later he noticed that the horse was not acting just like himself. He was nervous and fidgety and there was a stiffness in the injured leg. Looking at the sore he saw that it had broken again and there was a thin trickle of ugly looking matter oozing from it.

The next morning when he went into the stable to feed the horses, Nip was frothing at the mouth. The stiffness had extended to all his four legs, and he held them extended as if to keep himself from falling. He looked at his master with

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 wide, startled eyes that showed much of the whites and from time to time a shiver ran through his body.

Jerry saw himself faced with one of the most serious disasters that can befall a tenant farmer. Without going back to the house for his breakfast, he saddled Tuck and galloped away in search of Doc Beasley, the veterinary.

They came back a couple of hours later riding side by side. As soon as Jerry laid eyes upon the horse, he knew that he was much worse. The shivers had changed to convulsive shudders, and pain and terror looked out of the animal's dilated eyes.

The veterinary, a lean old grayhound with a face of tanned leather, shook his head.

"You'd best put a bullet into him, Jerry, an' have done with it. I cud cure him, but it'd cost yuh more'n what the hoss's woth. That damned antitoxin fer lockjaw's high's hell an' it takes so much fer a hoss 'tain't practical nohaow. If yuh wanta take a chanct on it's helpin' him, I kin give him a shot o' some other stuff that sometimes does the trick. It'll cost yuh five dollars, an' I hain't promisin' that it'll cure him. But onct in a while it does. Anyhaow whether yuh take it or whether yuh don't take it, I won't charge yuh nothin' fer comin' here, 'cause I'm on my way to Joe Patton's sick caow an' I know yuh hain't no millionaire."

"Let's try it, Jerry," implored Judith, who had come into the stable behind the men. "It seems a shame not to let him have one chanct."

"All right, Doc," agreed Jerry a bit huskily. "Go ahead an' try what you kin do. If I had the money I'd feel like tryin' the big cure. But I hain't got the money. So that settles it flat."

The horse doctor cleansed the wound, took a big syringe from his kit satchel, filled it with a yellowish fluid, and gave the horse an injection in the leg close to the wounded spot.

"There," he said as he replaced the syringe, "if he hain't a heap better agin to-morrer mornin' he hain't a-goin' to git no better. Anyhaow, you hain't got the hardest luck there is, Jerry, ole man. Two o' Jim Summerfield's hawgs has got the

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238 owner of his own share, (either divided or undivided) as a propritorproprietor [sic] of an entire estate; and consequently a sale or gift executed by the former, of his own share, should, with reason, be considered equally valid, as a contract by the latter for his sole estate. Hence prohibition of such transfer being clearly opposed to common sense and ordinary usage, should be understood as only forbidding a dereliction of moral duty, committed by those who infringe it, and not as invalidating the transfer.

27. In adapting this mode of exposition of the law, the author of the Dayubhagu has pursued the course frequently inculcated by Munoo and others; a few instances of which I beg to bring briefly to the consideration of the reader, for the full justification of this author. Munoo, the first of all Hindoo legislators, prohibits donation to an unworthy Brahmun in the following terms—“Let no man, apprised of this law, present, even water to a priest, who acts like a cat, nor to him who acts like a bittern, nor to him who is unlearned in the Ved.” (Ch. IV. v. 192). Let us suppose that in disregard to this prohibition a gift has been actually made to one of those priests; a question then naturally arises, whether this injunction of Munoo’s invalidates the gift, or whether such infringment of the law only renders the donor guilty of a moral offence. The same legislator, in continuation, thus answers; “Since property, though legally gained, if it be given to either of those three, becomes prejudicial in the next world both to the giver and receiver.” (v. 193). The same authority forbids marrying girls of certain descriptions, saying, “Let him not marry a girl with reddish hair, nor with any deformed limb, nor one troubled with habitual sickness, nor one


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 cholera, an' the whole thirty-odd'll be dead afore the week's gone. So you see you might a had it worst."

With this cold but well meant comfort he was gone.

The next morning when Jerry went into the stable, the horse was down, his jaws were locked and he was writhing in agony. Tuck, tied at a little distance, looked at him with mild, questioning eyes.

He went to the house for his revolver. Judith said nothing. When she saw him take the gun out of the dresser drawer she did not need to ask what it meant. A few moments later she heard a shot and knew that it was all over for Nip.

It was war time and horse hides were worth four dollars or more. So, although he loathed to do it, Jerry skinned the poor animal that for so many years had been his friend and the companion of his labors. When the carcass was skinned he tied a chain about the hind legs, attached the other end to Tuck's harness and, taking the lines in his hand, said, "Git up, Tuck."

Restless and unhappy from the odious smell of blood, the horse started uneasily, shied a little and looked around with dilated nostrils and eyes that showed the whites. Then, seeing his master, hearing his voice and feeling his familiar hand upon the lines, he went forward with his usual steady step, dragging his dead companion.

Judith, watching sadly from the porch, saw the little procession pass across the pasture. It had snowed during the night and the ground was still white. Against the whiteness the dark figures of the man and horse plodded with bowed heads. Behind them trailed a long thing of an evil scarlet color. The front legs stood up stiffly in the air. The inert head and neck, preternaturally long, trailed behind like a snake. Behind the dragging head a dark streak marked its path from the barn.

On the far side of the pasture lay a deep gully. Here Jerry halted Tuck and manœuvered him back and forth so as to get the dead animal as near to the brink as possible and in the position he wanted. Then he unloosed the chain from the hind

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