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 and he and Lizzie May would drive forth grandly. Lizzie May was very proud of her swain's good looks and store clothes and of the shiny, red-wheeled buggy. When Craw guffawed and spoke of him as "Dam Fooler," and when Judith teased her wickedly about him, she became very indignant and haughty.

Judith, too, was rapidly growing up. She had become such a tall, straight, handsome girl, with such strong, free gestures and such a ringing, careless laugh, that Bill's heart swelled with pride when he saw people turn to look after her on the streets in Clayton. She was learning, too, to smile at the young men, and practising whenever occasion offered the arts of banter and coquetry.

She began to develop an interest in clothes, and brought to the neat, but uninspired dressmaking of the twins a sense of form, color, and picturesqueness.

"You know, Lizzie May, you ought to wear soft, sleazy things an' have 'em nice an' full. Get a blue voile—not a real light blue, but that there new Alice blue. You'll have to send off for it to get the right color. An' make it with the waist crossing in front an' a real full skirt an' a sash tied in a big bow at the back. Then you'd look so nice that Dan Pooler'd jes have to ast you whether he wanted you or not."

"You shet up an' tend yer own business, Judy," Lizzie May answered. Her uncertain relations with Dan were making her somewhat irritable. But she heeded the suggestions about the dress and followed them out as best she could.

"An' I'm a-goin' to have me a new petticoat that won't be like nobody else's petticoat," Judy went on. "I thought it out las' night afore I went to sleep. I'm a-goin' to get some red turkey cotton, real bright, an' have it in points all araound the bottom an' make three black French dots in each point. I bet when you two see it you'll both want one like it."

"You'd better be thinkin' of havin' yo'se'f a warm jacket agin the time winter comes on," said Luella half reprovingly yet betraying more than a gleam of interest in the prospective petticoat.

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 "I'm a-goin' to have braown ve'vet collar an' cuffs on my new jacket," put in Lizzie May.

So they would sit together stitching and planning and chattering happily over their few yards of cheap cotton goods.

The mail order catalogues had of late years come to take a large place in the lives of the Pippingers and their neighbors, much to the disgust of Peter Akers, whose store was shrinking instead of growing. They were a source of endless interest to the girls, especially the twins. In the winter evenings when the lamp was lighted they would bring these enormous books to the table and turn the endless pages, never tiring of the pictures of slim, simpering, abundant-haired young women arrayed in coats, suits, sweaters, dresses, aprons, nightgowns, corsets, chemises, union suits: every kind of garment that goes upon the female figure. The gorgeous colored pages held them longest and often caused Lizzie May to gasp with admiration and envy.

"My, I wish I was as pretty as that and had that blue silk dress!" she sighed, pointing out the object of her envy to Luella.

"Oh, land, you're much better lookin' than that gal, Liz!" Judy exclaimed, looking over her shoulder. "She's got an awful smirk!"

Lizzie May, though not entirely convinced, patted her blond hair with a gratified expression.

Bill and the boys looked at the pictures of men in overalls and work shirts, tools, wagons, buggies, harness, and farm machinery. Sometimes Craw would hesitate over the pages of ladies in underwear, then blush furiously and turn quickly to the mowing machines if he thought that any one was noticing him.

The books served many purposes, all and more than does the daily newspaper in homes where the newspaper enters. The old ones were used to light fires, to wrap up winter pears, to paste over broken window panes or cracks in the wall. In the backhouse they did duty as toilet paper. And Craw, beginning to smoke cigarettes, wrapped the crumbled native

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 leaf in a bit of the margin and puffed away with the air of one conscious that he has attained man's estate.

It was about this time that Judith and the twins took to using tooth brushes. But the boys, exhorted to do likewise, poohooed such vanities.

"Mebbe you gals needs to hoe out your teeth," Craw would say condescendingly, "but my mouth's clean, same's the rest o' my insides."

The summer that Judith was sixteen she came home from Sadieville one afternoon in a state of excitement.

"What d'ye think I'm a-fixin' to do, dad? I'm a-goin' over to Aunt Eppie Pettit's to work out. Aunt Eppie come out to the road as I was a-drivin' past an' she ses would I like to come over to her place to work. She's got hired hands a-eatin' there, and four cows to milk, an' she ses there's too much work for Cissy an' would I come for a spell. She snapped her false teeth at me a time or two, but I didn't mind. I 'member haow when I was little I used to think she was a-goin' to bite me; but now I ain't a-skairt of her. So I told her, yes, I'd come; an' I'm a-goin' to git a dollar a week. Elmer's plenty big enough to do my chores, so I kin be spared easy enough."

She said air this almost in one breath. Bill, who had been chopping stove wood, stood with one foot on the chopping block and looked at her with a mixture of surprise and disapproval.

"Pshaw, Judy," he exclaimed, spitting disparagingly into the chips. "What do you want to be a-goin' there fer? I wouldn't if I was you. My gal don't need to go a-emptyin' nobody's slops, let alone old Ezra Pettit's. I wouldn't do no sech thing."

"Oh, but I'm a-goin', dad. I told her I'd come. Craw works out an' earns money, an' I want to earn some money too. If I stay there ten weeks I'll have ten dollars, an' that'll buy me my clothes an' shoes fer the winter."

Bill saw that she was quite determined, so he made no further opposition. A couple of days later he drove her and her satchel of clothes over to Aunt Eppie's place, which was

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 about a mile and a half away on the road toward Sadieville. The road they traveled was known as the Dixie Pike. It was the main highroad between Cincinnati and Lexington. Before the Civil War it had been the coach road between these two cities; and the very old folk still told tales of prancing three-team coaches and gay horseback parties galloping by. Now one met mostly the wagons and buggies of tenant farmers, with an occasional automobile or a covered wagon occupied by gipsy folk or horse traders.

The house of the Pettits was a long, white, rambling, leisurely looking place with green shutters and a wide porch supported by square white pillars. It had been built in ante bellum days for people of a leisurely habit of life. It stood some distance back from the road, and between the road and the house stretched a neat bluegrass lawn dotted with flower beds and shade trees. A low stone wall separated the lawn from the roadside. From the rear came the cackle of hens, the cooing of doves and the scream of a peacock. Basking in the morning sunshine the place looked gracious and peaceful.

Bill reluctantly deposited his daughter and her satchel at Aunt Eppie's gate.

"Don't take no lip from nobody, Judy. You've allus got a home to come back to," he advised, as he turned the mules' heads toward home.

Judith swung briskly up the flat stone walk, through the chinks of which grass was growing, then around by the little side path to the kitchen door. Here she found Cissy rolling pie crust on a floury baking board. She and Cissy were old acquaintances. Judith sat down by the table and they chatted together till Aunt Eppie came in.

Cissy was a middle-aged woman of spare figure, dull eyes, neatly combed hair and blurred, nondescript features. There was nothing about her to notice or remember. Some explanation for this lack of personality might be found in the fact that she had been working for the Pettits since she was nineteen years old. During that time she had never had as much as a mild flirtation with any man, nor had she ever been fur-

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 ther from the Pettits' kitchen than Sadieville. For over twenty years the life of Aunt Eppie's household had been her life. She had gone there a timid young orphan girl; and in the unbroken routine of these twenty years had become a dull middle aged drudge. Each week she had received her dollar, and she was reported to have money "loaned out." Judith looked at her and thought of this report and envied Cissy. Her young mind perceived nothing of tragedy in Cissy's long years of celibacy spent in the routine of a stranger's kitchen. The only thought that passed through her head as she sat there in her radiant youth was: "My, if I only had all that money she's saved, wouldn't I have me nice clothes!"

Aunt Eppie bustled into the kitchen and was pleased to find Judith.

She was a tall, large-featured, bony woman and had a protruding chin and a wrinkled, thin-lipped mouth that shut together with the strong, swift motion of a snapping turtle. The click of her false teeth lent realism to this motion and caused her to strike terror into the hearts of small children toward whom she tried to be affable.

"Well, naow, that's a good gal to come like you said you would," she condescended. "So often these hired hands promises to come an' that's the last you see of 'em. Cissy, you take her up to your room an' show her where to put her things. She might as well sleep with you an' save dirtyin' up two pairs o' sheets, let alone the wear an' tear on 'em. An' after that she can he'p you git the apples ready fer the pies an' shell the peas and scrape the taters fer dinner. An' mind you, scrape an' not peel 'em, Judy, 'cause they're jes new out o' the ground. It's a sin to waste the best o' sech taters by peelin' 'em."

With the adaptability of youth Judith drifted easily enough into the life of the Pettit family. She left most of the indoor work to the patient Cissy and busied herself with the cows, the chickens, the turkeys and the garden, as she had done at home. She and Cissy did most of the work. Aunt Eppie believed herself to be still a hard worker, but in reality she spent most of her time bustling from one place to another bossing

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 the girls, Uncle Ezra, and the farm hands. She was always nosing out all sorts of small, neglected matters and calling them to the attention of the neglecter.

"Ezry, don't you fergit to fix that garden fence this mornin'," she would shout into Uncle Ezra's ear at breakfast. "The hens is a-gittin' in an' a-eatin' into the hearts of all my beets."

"An' Judy, don't fail to coop up all the settin' hens when you gather up the eggs. I don't want to raise no more chicks this year. What with the price of eggs so low it don't hardly pay to feed hens." She sighed heavily. Any mention of money loss, real or fancied, always brought this sigh to her lips.

When she was not busy directing the other members of the household, she read the "Country Gentleman," whose rosy tales of phenomenal success on the farm excited her interest and envy, made log cabin blocks for bedquilts or cut and sewed carpet rags. She already had carpets enough to keep the whole house thoroughly padded for at least a quarter century, but she could not bear to see the rags go to waste.

She was one of the few remaining members of the old "first families" of Kentucky. Her haughty aquiline nose, broad brow and penetrating eyes showed that she had intellect and breeding. In the old days, several decades before the Civil War, her father had purchased hundreds of acres in Scott County for twenty-five cents an acre. He cleared the land, realized about a hundred dollars an acre out of the timber and still possessed his hundreds of acres of fine clay loam, virgin soil, only needing the seed to produce enormous crops of almost anything. So he became rich and built this leisurely white mansion. The war brought disaster and poverty. Aunt Eppie's father was one of the few landed proprietors who did not move away but remained to begin life over again as a poor farmer. In the school of penury, Aunt Eppie, applying her superior intellect and energy, proved to be all too apt a scholar. She learned not only to be saving but to be niggardly and penurious.

Uncle Ezra had been one of Aunt Eppie's father's hired

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 hands. He was of much commoner clay than his wife and with age had become a mere clod. Almost as deaf as one of his own well planted fence posts, he heard nothing nor cared to hear. He spoke rarely and in half articulate grunts. His one thought in life had always been how to get the most out of his land, which was not his, but Aunt Eppie's, as she was not slow to remind him when the occasion arose. Now that he was too old to work hard he spent his days puttering about the fields and the barnyard watching, always watching. He had the reputation of being the hardest man to work for in the whole of Scott County and he paid the lowest wages.

Once in a while Aunt Eppie's brother, Hiram Stone, ate a meal in the house. He was a spare, silent man. Since his wife's death many years before he had lived attended by one old servant, in the big, rambling house on his estate. Nobody quite knew how he passed his days. He had been seen to read, to cultivate a little patch of vegetables and flowers, and to smoke meditatively on the back porch. In his youth he had been sent away to college. He always employed an overseer and had very little to do with his tenants. Nobody ever called him "Uncle Hiram." This was because he lived his life to himself and his life was not their life. He was not niggardly and interfering like Uncle Ezra and many of the other landlords. He allowed his tenants to keep a cow and pasture it on his land. He put no limit to the number of their chickens and turkeys. Yet the tenants distrusted and avoided him. They would rather work under Uncle Ezra, because he was one of themselves and they understood him.

It caused Aunt Eppie endless worry and chagrin to see the way her brother mismanaged his land. The overseer was letting it all, she said, and the tenants did as they liked and stole from him before his very face. It was a shame and a disgrace.

She said as much to him time and again. But he went his own way. He treated her always with politeness and deference and only smiled gently and enigmatically when she nagged him. The smile drove her to distraction.

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 land and lived in a house of seventeen rooms and were said to have money in all the banks in Scott County, their way of life was not different in any essential from that of their tenants. It was even more stark and barren and sordid than most, for in the humbler homes there was sometimes love and fun, and here there was neither. The meals were eaten in dull silence except when Aunt Eppie remembered something that somebody hadn't done or when the hired girls and farm hands, who ate from the same oilcloth as their employers, got to sparring with each other.

Two hired hands ate at the dinner table, but got their breakfasts and supper at home. These were Jabez Moorhouse and Jerry Blackford, second son of Andrew Blackford, who owned a small farm next to the Pippingers. Jabez, who, when not drunk, usually held his peace, rarely spoke at the table except to ask for another portion of string beans or to have the sorghum pitcher passed to him. When he raised his head from his plate his rather vague blue eyes seemed to be either turned inward or looking at something a long distance away. Jerry, who had come successfully through his cat-torturing period, had grow into a quiet, decent, clean appearing young fellow, blond and ruddy like David of old and good to look upon in his strong young manhood. He was not more given to conversation than Jabez.

Fortunately for Judith the blight of bareness and dullness that lay over Aunt Eppie's household did not extend to the barnyard. There the morning sunlight fell as goldenly as in princes' courtyards. The geese were as dignified, the turkeys as proud, and the hens as busy as any others of their kind, and Judith enjoyed ministering to their needs and watching their ways.

The turkeys, fifty odd of them, had been little fellows when Judith came, with flat tortoise bodies and long necks, and Aunt Eppie let them wander at will among the beets and cabbages. Whenever they saw a bug or a fly they darted forth these long necks with a quick, snakelike movement and rarely failed to catch their prey. Soon they grew too big to be al-

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 lowed in the garden and roamed the alfalfa and corn fields for their food. As they grew toward maturity sex divided them into two groups. The female turkeys kept together in a small, silent band and devoted themselves mainly to the business of eating, while their brothers preferred to loaf in the barnyard. A spot speckled with light and shade under a row of locust trees was their favorite promenade. With their tails spread fan-shape, their wing feathers scraping the ground, their heads and necks brilliantly blue and red and the little wormlike appendage above their beaks inflated and pendulous they would pace grandly up and down with a slow, dignified movement. The sun, striking along their satiny backs, made their feathers gleam with changing tints of rose, gold, green, and copper.

When they grew tired of the parade they loved to slip away and steal food that they knew was not intended for them. Aunt Eppie's grapes and peaches were their favorite tidbits. While feeding on these delicate morsels they talked to each other with little congratulatory gulps of delight like water gurgling out of the neck of a bottle. Then Judith would run and chase them out of the orchard, and they would all stretch out their necks at her and gobble together in indignant chorus.

It seemed a pity that so much beauty, pride, and joy in life should go to tempt the cloyed palate of some smug bishop or broker who had, compared with the soul that had lately animated the bit of white meat on his plate, but a poor notion of what it was to love, to play, and to enjoy the sun and the fruits of the earth.

"It's a shame fer folks to eat sech critters," Judith thought one blue September morning, as she watched the turkeys parade under the locust trees.

She had been slopping the pigs and was leaning on the railing of the hogpen looking at the turkeys beyond. A female turkey that had strayed from her sisters was among them and trying to make her escape. Each time that she made a move to go away, the young Toms for pure devilishness would intercept her by stepping in front of her, like a pack of village boys teasing a little girl. When she at last made her escape and flew

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 in heaven may have permitted her to look down from her abode of blessedness, and see what has been going forward within these walls this morning?"

Immediately after the Service was the Consecration of the private Burial-ground of Mr. Stanhope, then of the addition to the Churchyard, and afterwards of the Parochial Cemetery, under three separate Consecration Deeds.

There was a Confirmation at three p.m., followed by an Organ Recital by Mr. Ernest Wood, Organist of St. Mary Magdalene, Lincoln, a native of Cawthorne, who presided at the organ at all the Services of the Opening day.

At the Evening Service, at seven, the Psalms were 118 and 122; the Lessons, Ezra iii. and Rev. xxii; the Sermon was preached by Mr. Stanhope's intimate friend the Rev. J. E. Cross, Vicar of Appleby (Lincs.), and Canon of Lincoln Cathedral. On the following two evenings the preachers were the Revs. C. S. Stanhope, Vicar of Crowton, elder son of the late Vicar of Cawthorne, and the Rev. J. Ingham Brooke, Rector of Thornhill.

The day of the Re-opening was a beautiful calm sunny winter's day.

At the public Luncheon held in the Boys' School, at which Mr. Stanhope was only present at the conclusion, he specially referred to "the Church now restored being always open; it is free to all; and I hope that it will be appreciated by some as a place of retirement and contemplation, a place of rest always ready to receive those who may wish to turn from their daily work for a few moments by themselves.

The Faculty for the Restoration was granted at the Chancellor's Court at Ripon July 22nd, 1875, the cost of obtaining this unopposed Faculty being £33 10s. 10d.

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of the Church does not call for any lengthened description. The Tower belongs to the fifteenth century and is of the local character. Its height to the top of the battlements is 70 feet 4 inches; from the battlements to the top of the Pinnacles is 8 feet. The northeast pinnacle was struck by lightning some years ago and fell through the nave roof upon the organ which was in the west gallery. The North Porch has a figure of St. Paulinus in a niche over the entrance, the work and gift of Mr. Samuel Swift, a native of Cawthorne, whose brother has had the entire superintendence of the Restoration, as their father had of the building of the Church at Hoyland-Swaine. In the tracery of the North Porch Windows are the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. Under the East Window of the North Chancel Aisle is built into the wall the head of a Cross of the eleventh or early part of the twelfth century. The stone used in the older part of the Church—the Tower and North Aisle—seems to have been merely loose surface stones: all the new work is of Thurlstone and Huddersfield stone. The old Sun-dial on the Tower has not been replaced, with its "Via Vitæ"—"The Way of Life"—inscription, and the initials "J. H, 1798."

originally extended probably as far south as the present one, but went scarcely any farther west than the Tower or farther east than the present Chancel. A considerable addition was made to the west, as far as the present row of elms, in 1813, and a tradition says that the first burial in that addition was George Batchelor, a coachman at Cannon Hall, whose widow came from Barnsley to her husband's burial in the carriage which brought Mr. John Stanhope home on parole as a French prisoner. A further addition was made at the east end in 1852, and the footpath which ran near the boundary of the old Churchyard was altered in 1867 to the boundary of the addition. The North Wall of the Churchyard, from the entrance to the vault, was built, and the boundary straightened, at the time when the vault itself was made, in 1865-6, from the designs of Mr. Shaw of Saddleworth. There have been the following burials up to the present time in the family vault: Louisa Elizabeth Stanhope in

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 1867; Hugh Robert (removed from the churchyard) infant son of Mr. and Mrs. W. S. Stanhope; Hugh Spencer Stanhope, 1871; Mr. and Lady Elizabeth Stanhope, 1873; Philip (General) Stanhope, 1880. The late Mrs. W. S. Stanhope lies outside the mausoleum at its west front.

The part of the Churchyard which is between the row of elms and the sunk-fence is raised from the soil removed in the recent alterations, and is not intended to be ever used for burials. The land was given by Mr. Stanhope at the same time as the acre of land below it, which latter was conveyed to the Rural Sanitary Authority under the "Public Health (Interments) Act, 1879," known as "Marten's Act," the expense of its being walled round, &c., being defrayed by the rates. Three-quarters of the acre was consecrated by the Bishop of Ripon immediately after the Church's Re-opening Service (Dec. 21, 1880). Under a separate Consecration Deed the addition between the elms and the sunk fence was consecrated, being conveyed to the Vicar and Churchwardens; and the family vault and private burial-ground around it were also consecrated, being reserved by the donor for his own family's use under a separate Consecration Deed, in accordance with a Clause in the Burials Act which gives the donor power to reserve for his own family's use not more than one-sixth part of what he gives for Parochial Burial-ground.

Among the Memorial Stones in the Churchyard there is none that goes back beyond the early part of the seventeenth century. The oldest of all is one of the Shirt family:

"Hic jacet William Shyrte de Cawthorne Lanes qui obiit nono die Junii 1630, natus annis sexaginta octo vicesimo nono die Januarii ultimo preterito." "Hic jacet Johannes Shirte junior de Cawthorne-lanes qui obiit duodecimo die Febr. Anno Domini 1664. Fui, non sum. Estis, non eritis" ("I was, I am not: ye are, ye will not be").

"March ye 14, 1694. Here was interred ye body of Sarah Shirt Widd and Relict of Nathaniel Shirt sometime Vicar of Kirkburton in the same grave where the Body of Ann Broadley her Mother Widd and Relict of Nicholes Broadley sometime Minister of Cawthorne was layd ye 2 of May, 1663.

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 "Here lyeth interred the Body of Dorothy the wife of Nathan Staniforth late of Penistone gent, and daughter of Mr. Nathaniel Shirt sometime Vicar of Kirkburton. She departed this life the 23rd day of November Anno Domini 1726, aged 74 years."

A short notice of this Nathaniel Shirt is given in Morehouse's History of Kirkburton. He is believed to have been the son of John Shirt who was steward to Mr. Godfrey Bosvile of Gunthwaite, and a near relation of Captain Shirt of Rawroyd, a Parliamentary officer. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he took his M.A. in 1643. He was appointed to the Episcopal Chapel of Midhope by Mr. Bosvile, and in 1649, through Mr. Bosvile's influence, to Kirkburton. He married Sarah, daughter of the Rev. Nicholas Broadley, Incumbent of Cawthorne, and died at Kirkburton in 1662.

"Hic jacet Agnis uxorem (sic) Roberti Smith quæ obiit secundo die Februarii, 1650."

"Hic jacet Anna filia Henrici Woolrich 1660."

"Here lieth the body of Mary the wife of Matthew Lindley, who was buried the 5 day of June, 1640."

"In memory of Thomas Pashley, yeoman, of Cawthorne, who gave six pounds yearly for ever to the Minister of Cawthorne by virtue of a Feoffee Deed: he was interred ye 24 day of March, 1667. Via misericordiæ, via Beatitudinis." ("The way of Mercy is the way of Blessedness.")

Elizabeth Hewitt, 1667; William Littlewood, yeoman, 1697; Alice Hyrst, formerly wife to Robert Burgon, 1687: Thomas Falley, Brookehouse, 1699; Thos. Gawthorpe, 1684; Matthew Walker, 1676;—Firth, 1666; Martha, wife of John Lindley, 1666; Anne Baxter, 1689; Robert Dixon, 1664,—and one later, of Clay Hall, 1674; Nathaniel, son of Nathaniel Moxon, gent., from the County of Darby, 1672;—Turton of Barnby Green, 1673; A. Micklethwaite, 1676, of Woolgreave, yeoman; Lindley of Jowet-house, 1654 and 1659; Hannah Robuck, 1674. The Wests of Norcroft, Waltons of Cawthorne Lanes, and Taylors of Cawthorne, have several stones beginning with the early part of the following—the eighteenth—century. John Street, Fellmonger, 1734; Cudworth, 1770; Cleggs, and Moaksons, (Caleb, 1767).

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 back to her sisters, they all reached out their necks and gobbled after her derisively. Jerry and Jabez, starting out to the field where they were cutting tobacco, came and leaned for a few moments on the railing beside Judith.

"Do you know what them young Toms reminds me of?" said Judith, looking at Jerry with an eye not entirely free from the self-consciousness of sex. "They make me think of a pack o' fellers a-standin' raound the street corner in Clayton or Sadieville of a Sunday afternoon dressed in their good clothes, a-swellin' up their chests an' a-cranin' their necks after every gal that goes by, an' then a-blabbin' together about her after she's gone a-past. They'd otta think shame to theirselves for bein' so vain an' idle. There's the turkey hens all out in the field a-eatin' corn so they kin grow up quick an' lay eggs an' make more little turkeys, so Aunt Eppie an' Uncle Ezra kin have more money to put in the bank. That's haow a turkey'd otta act, 'stead of enjoyin' his own vain life."

She laughed and looked quizzically at Jerry.

Jerry had no rejoinder to make. He was not quick at repartee. But he was young, healthy, and handsome; and as he looked from the turkeys back to Judith, the smile on his lips and the answering look in his eyes made words an impertinence. Jabez looked at the turkeys and at the boy and girl and laughed an amused, indulgent laugh. He was fifty-five and had long known the way of a turkey in the sun and the way of a man with a maid.

"The young Toms'll be cut off in the pride o' life," he said in his rich, sonorous voice, "an' jes as well for them that they air. An' the turkey hens'll live to raise up families. An' the families they raise'll repeat the same thing all over agin, an' so on world without end. Amen. Solomon was right when he said there's no new thing under the sun, an' that which has been is that which is a-goin' to be. An' yet each new batch takes as much interest in livin' as if they was the only ones that had ever lived an' was a-goin' to keep on livin' forever. It's the same with folks. Hain't that so, Jerry?"

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 Jabez knew he hadn't. He had slyly filched two hairpins out of Judith's hair, had stuck them behind his ears and was pretending to march away with them.

"You gimme back them hairpins, Jerry Blackford. I've got on'y five an' my hair won't stay up with three. You'd best hand 'em over, 'cause I kin give you a black eye quick as look at you."

She tried to get hold of Jerry's wrists. Jerry got hers instead and they struggled together laughing. After a while he let go of her wrists and allowed her to capture the pins.

"You'd best git along to work," she cried, flushed and sparkling. "Uncle Ezry'll be out here in a jiffy an'll want to know why you ain't to field."

"Yaas, the old groundhog'll be diggin' out afore long," grumbled Jabez. "Come on, Jerry, folks has gotta have their terbaccer. Judy, you go in an' tell Cissy to cook us a dern good dinner."

As Judith turned away from the hogpen, bucket in hand, she almost ran into a lean, spry old man, who had come up silently behind her, his steps making no noise on the scattered straw and chaff of the barnyard.

"Howdy, Uncle Sam. Haow's Aunt Sally?"

His face darkened slightly. "Oh, she keeps smart. Is Uncle Ezry anywheres hereabouts?"

"He's mos' likely in the kitchen warmin' his feet," said Judith. "Every mornin' he has to warm his feet the longest time afore he'll step outdoors. He sets there with his sock feet on the oven shelf, an' sets an' sets. An' Cissy has to go raound him every time she wants to git to the cupboard. She says sometimes she thinks he's never a-goin' to git up an' go aout where he belongs. I'm glad my feet ain't allus a-cold."

"That's haow you young uns allus is," answered Uncle Sam. "No feelin's for the sufferin's of the old." It was plain from Uncle Sam's way of speaking that he did not class himself among the aged.

"Andy Blackford was a-tellin' me that Uncle Ezry had some alfalfy hay he wanted to git shet of 'count of needin' the barn

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 room. I'm a bit short o' hay this year an' I thought I'd come daown an' see if I couldn't make some sort of a deal with him."

By this time they had reached the kitchen door. Uncle Sam stepped inside and found Ezra, as Judith had predicted, sitting with his feet on the oven fender, his suspenders down, his long gray face set and motionless. He turned his head as Uncle Sam darkened the sunny doorway.

"Waal, Sam."

"Waal, Ezry. Purty weather we're a-havin'. I hain't seed a purtier September since '83, the fall afore the coldest winter we ever had to my knowin'. An' this summer's crops is the best there's been this nine year. Corn's made an' terbaccer's made; but we'll be needin' a good rain soon to freshen up the pastures."

Uncle Ezra did not hear a word of any of this, so he grunted for answer in a non-committal manner. His feet being now roasted to a turn, he fished out his congress shoes from under the stove and drew them on slowly and methodically. Then he got up, hitched his suspenders over his stooping shoulders, took down his hat from its peg by the side of the door, and stepped out into the sunshine followed by his visitor.

The two old men passed out of the garden gate and walked across the barnyard side by side.

"I hearn you had a part spiled stack of alfalfy hay you was a-wishin' to git shet of, Ezry."

Uncle Sam said this not in his former conversational tone, but in a loud shout close to Ezra's ear; for it was intended to be heard.

"Part spiled nuthin! There hain't a leaf of it spiled. It's all good, clean alfalfy. On'y reason I want to sell it, I got plenty hay this year, an' I'm a-goin' to be needin' the room in the terbaccer barn."

"I hearn it was part spiled," shouted back Uncle Sam with brazen conviction. "Anyway, let's have a look at it, Ezry."

The two men, the one with bent back and plodding legs, the other almost as straight and spry as a youth, walked side by side down the ridge path to Uncle Ezra's biggest tobacco barn.

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 To the right of them lay Ezra's gently rolling pasture dotted with cattle and sheep. To the left stretched his dark green alfalfa fields, his corn, ripe and ready to be cut, and his field of ripe tobacco, the broad, tropical looking leaves now turned to a rich golden color. Part of the field was already bare; and in the distance Jerry and Jabez could be seen going down the rows with their sharp tobacco knives. With one stroke they split the stalk of each plant, with the other they severed it from the root. The cut plants drying on the tobacco sticks set at intervals along the rows, trailed limply, waiting to be hauled in.

Arrived at the tobacco barn, they found the alfalfa stacked in a close-packed pile in one corner.

"Why, there hain't much hay here!" shouted Uncle Sam, kicking disdainfully into the pile. "It's loose as kin be. There hain't no weight there. It wasn't tromped when it was put in. I bet I cud haul the whole thing away in two loads."

"Two loads!" snorted Uncle Ezra. "Why, Sam Whitmarsh, there's a good seven ton o' hay there if there's a paound. It's packed close as it kin be packed."

Uncle Sam kicked into the hay and succeeded in finding near a crack in the wall a small mildewed spot.

"It's spiled, Ezry, same's I said it was," he shouted triumphantly. "Look ye here! All along these cracks the rain's beat in an' spiled it. An' there's no tellin' haow far that there mildew goes. Spiled alfalfy hain't no good fer nuthin'."

"Now, Sam, there ain't no use in your a-talkin' on like that," said Uncle Ezra in the tone of one who deals with facts. "You know well nuf there hain't but a handful of it in that corner that's been teched by rain."

"An' see here," went on Sam, "this hay must o' laid two or three days afore you raked it. Why, half the leaves is off. An' I bet it had a rain onto it, too, while it laid on the graound. Look what a dark color it is. Good alfalfy hain't that color."

"It didn't lay ner it didn't see no rain," exclaimed Uncle Ezra, his voice harsh with indignation. "You know yerse'f, Sam, I cut an' hauled that hay latter part of las' July; an'

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 there didn't a drop o' rain fall after the ninth. The alfalfy's a good color if ye see it in the light."

"Looks to me like it's a bit woody," mused Uncle Sam, rubbing a scrap between his thumb and forefinger. "An' here's seed on some of it. You was a bit late a-cuttin' this hay, Ezry."

"Naow, Sam Whitmarsh, you know well's I do, I cut this here hay in the bloom." Uncle Ezra's hands were beginning to tremble with exasperation. "Why, I 'member you come by one Friday when we was a-cuttin' an' you said what fine alfalfy that was."

"Haow do I know this is the same alfalfy, Ezry?" queried Uncle Sam, darting a swift look from his keen blue eyes. "Don't look to me like it is. An' I see jes lots o' weeds through it, too. Part of it hain't good fer nuthin but beddin'. Well, Ezry," with the tone of one coming at last to the crucial point, "what're you a-askin' for it?"

There was a long, ruminating pause. The subject of price could not be approached without deliberation befitting its importance.

"Waal," hesitated Uncle Ezra at last, "you've said every dirty thing you kin think of to say about the hay. But the hay's good hay jes the same; an' you know it well's I do. An' if I had a place to put it I wouldn't sell you nary pound of it fer no money. But bein' as haow I gotta have the room in the barn, I'll take forty-five dollars, an' you do the haulin'. An' that's dern cheap hay I'm a-offerin' you."

"Cheap, Ezry! Before you'll git anybody to give you forty-five dollars fer that there little mangerful o' spiled hay, your new barn'll fall to pieces from old age. An' I guess neither you ner me'll be here to see that happen, Ezry. Be reasonable now, Ezry. You know there hain't but a ton an' a half there. I'll give you twenty dollars fer this here little handful o' hay a-laying before us. An' that's a-payin' you twict over."

"Twenty dollars!" shrieked Uncle Ezra. "Why, there's seven good ton o' hay there. An' hay's worth sixteen dollars a ton at the cheapest. I ain't wishin' to give the hay away. If

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 every leaf of it was spiled it'd be worth more'n that to me to put under my grapes an' peach trees."

"All right, Ezry. Like enough you'd best use it fer that. 'Tain't no good fer nuthin but manure an' beddin' anyway. I don't know as I'd want to bother hookin' up to haul it away."

Uncle Sam made as though to leave the barn.

Ezra weakened. He was very anxious to get rid of the hay; he needed the barn at once for his tobacco. And buyers for hay, he knew too well, were not to be readily found at this time of year. Also he knew from sad experience the effect of alfalfa upon tobacco when the two were left in the same barn together. He had been prepared to make some sacrifice; but he shrank from making the sacrifice that Sam demanded of him. Because, what would Aunt Eppie say?

He turned away shaking his head with a final movement, as though negotiations were ended. But Uncle Sam, casting at him a searching, sidewise glance, saw the look of irresolution pass across his face.

"You won't take twenty, eh, Ezry? Then what will you take?"

There was a long pause.

"Waal, I'll take thirty."

The four words dragged themselves with the greatest reluctance from Uncle Ezra's lips.

There was another long pause. Uncle Sam spat deliberately, took a fresh chew of tobacco, and looked out across the landscape meditatively through the big barn doors.

"I tell ye, Ezry," he said at last with great deliberation. "Nobody hain't a-buyin' hay this time o' year. An' if you leave the hay here an' put yer terbaccer in, the terbaccer'll like enough heat an' spile. An' even if it don't heat an' spile, it'll turn dark, sure's yer shirt's on yer back. An' you know what price dark terbaccer fetches. Naow, Ezry, seem' we've allus been good neighbors together, I'm willin' to split the diff'rence with ye. Twenty-seven fifty I'll pay ye right here in cold cash. Will ye take it?"

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 Uncle Ezra looked beaten and utterly miserable. "Oh, I s'pose so," he grunted at last.

Uncle Sam had come prepared to clinch matters. He pulled out from his hip pocket a roll of bills, selected two tens, a five, and a two; then fished around among his loose change till he found a fifty-cent piece, and laid the whole in Uncle Ezra's reluctant, yet eager, hand.

Aunt Eppie was waiting anxiously for the result. She had watched the men set out together.

"Did he buy it, Ezry?" she queried excitedly, as soon as her husband appeared in the dooryard.

"Yump."

"Haow much did he give fer it?"

"Twenty-seven fifty."

"Twenty-seven fifty! Do you mean to tell me, Ezry Pettit, you sold that five ton o' good hay fer twenty-seven dollars an' fifty cents, an' hay worth sixteen dollars a ton if it's worth a dollar! The poorhouse is where we'll all end up if that's the way you're a-goin' to go on!"

"Waal, I had to git shet of it; an' nobody's a-buyin' hay naow."

Uncle Ezra was too sick at heart to enter into a quarrel. He walked away as the easiest way of ending the argument, disgusted at the unreasonableness of womankind.

Uncle Sam, the veteran bargain driver, was as gratified as a boy who has just traded a watch that won't go for a shotgun that will. It was a feather in his cap to get the better of old Ezra Pettit. He bragged about it far and near and received congratulations from all the neighbors. There was nobody for ten miles around who did not enjoy a joke at the expense of Uncle Ezra. Being a wag, Uncle Sam could not resist the temptation to get some fun out of his deal. So he hauled the hay away in many lightly-piled loads, craftily built to look much larger than they really were. These loads got on Aunt Eppie's nerves. When the eleventh load trundled by the kitchen window, she shrieked hysterically: "Well, Ezra, ye might as well lock the doors an' pull daown the blinds! The

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 poorhouse is the place fer us! There goes Sam Whitmarsh with another load o' hay!"

Judith tittered immoderately behind the pantry door. But Cissy, being a serious and right-minded servant and a stranger to a sense of humor, felt deeply concerned at the loss of her master and mistress, considering it in some degree her own.

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had a long, beautiful fall that year. The warm, still sunny days followed each other week after week without a break, until it seemed as if there could never be wind again nor rain nor snow. In the mornings when Judith stepped out into the yard the grass was covered with flimsy gossamer webs encrusted with dewdrops, each one a rainbow in the sun. The beds of geraniums and the bank of scarlet sage along the stone wall seemed to grow each day a richer red. The morning glory vines over the back porch were full each morning with fresh bloom. In colors from faint blue to deep purple, from pale pink to rich rose, delicately veined and gleaming faërily with dew, they lifted up their frail cups to the sun that in a few hours would bring them death. Judith loved to look at the morning glories; yet they gave her a feeling of sadness. They were very silent, these mornings. No birds spilled music into the sunshine. Only a few crows cawed over distant fields. It had been a bountiful year and maturity and plenty were on every hand. The geese, the turkeys, and the chickens were full grown and the proud young males were fat and ready for the market. The hogs in the pen were getting all they could eat. Often they were too lazy to stand up to eat and munched their corn lolling luxuriously on their haunches. Much of their time they spent in sleeping. When they awoke they stretched, snorted, and rolled blissfully in the mud and straw, feeling the warmth of the sun on their bodies and the satisfying comfort of a full belly. By Thanksgiving they would be ready for the butcher's knife. There was a great abundance of tomatoes, cabbages, pumpkins, cornfield beans, everything that flourishes in the good clay soil of Scott County. Corn had been good and the cribs were full. Tobacco had been

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 extra good and Uncle Ezra's great barns were packed to the doors and filled the air about them with exotic fragrance.

There was much pickling, preserving, and canning done in Aunt Eppie's kitchen, for she hated to see anything go to waste. The savory smell of catsup and chili sauce in the making and of vinegar cooking with spices to pickle the pears and peaches streamed out of the door and whetted the appetite of passers-by. It was impossible for Aunt Eppie's family to consume all these bottled delicacies during the winter. Hence her cellar was crowded with the accumulation of many years. Still she insisted on making more each year. When the plenitude of peaches or grapes or cucumbers was so great that it was a human impossibility to can them all, she gave of her surplus to the tenants, grudgingly, yet with a certain Lady Bountiful pleasure in bestowing favors, and always with many admonitions as to the sin of improvidence.

"It's a sin for sech things to go to waste," she would say. "I'm sure I've give away twenty bushel this year if I've give one. An' all the tenants could have 'em jes as plentiful as us if they'd only plant 'em an' tend 'em. I do think it's a shame for folks to live like hawgs from hand to mouth an' never plant a tree ner a bush ner hardly a tater to put in their mouths. Jes look at all these tenant houses! Not a fruit tree ner a berry bush ner hardly as much as a row o' beets an' cabbages! The shiftlessness of some folks is sech that it's a wonder the Lord A'mighty don't send a plague on 'em."

As the weeks went by Jerry began to follow Judith with his eyes and to think about her when she was not in sight. She seemed to have become all at once a much more interesting person than the little black-haired tomboy that he had played and quarreled with ever since he could remember. One October evening when he came up from work and Judith was in the barnyard milking, he lingered about after putting up the horses, pretending to tinker with the harness. It was past the time to go home and he was hungry as a bear; but something held him. Judith got up from the red and white cow and went to the Jersey, the milking stool in one hand, the bucket

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 in the other. Jerry followed her with his eyes. She had on an old blue cotton dress with a long tear in one sleeve and her arms and neck were bare. Her arms and neck looked very beautiful to Jerry.

When she had finished milking the Jersey she got up, kicked the milking stool over toward the fence where the cows would not step on it, and turning to go to the house saw Jerry still pretending to work with the harness.

"Well, Jerry Blackford, hain't you got started fer home yet! Haow long d'ye think yer mammy'll keep yer supper hot fer ye?"

"Till I git there," answered Jerry, coming up beside her.

The horses, as soon as the harness fell from them, had gone at once to the horsepond and taken a long, satisfying drink, then trotted back to the barn to munch the good alfalfa hay that Jerry had pitched down for them. It had been a warm, lazy day. The sun had just set and the evening was still, blue and luminous. Three two-year-old colts that had been brought up for the night, feeling the stimulation of the cool air, began to frolic about the barnyard. They began by rolling in the loose straw and chaff, turning over and over on their backs and waving their hoofs foolishly in the air. Then one colt scrambled to his feet and raced to the gate, the others after him. Back they came from the road gate to the other gate leading into the field, then round and round the barnyard snorting and neighing, their heads and tails high, their manes flowing, their hoofs pounding rhythmically, their beautiful, strong, sleek bodies taut with the joy of the gallop. The work team, having eaten a good supper, trotted out from the barn and joined in the fun with as much zest as the colts.

In the middle of the barnyard stood Charlie, Uncle Ezra's old white mule. He was too old to do much work and was usually left out at pasture. To-night Uncle Ezra had brought him up because he was going to use him in the morning to help haul in corn fodder. Being old and white, he always looked rough and dirty; and he had an ugly bare spot on one shoulder where the harness had rubbed off the hair. His under lip had

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 grown loose and flabby and sagged down, giving his face a sullen look. Isolated by his age and his kind, he stood perfectly motionless, his knees bent like those of an old man, his head low, his haunches slack, his whole body sagging, and took not the least notice of the horses galloping about him. In joyous madcap career they raced in front of him, behind him, all around him; but he neither stirred nor raised his head.

"That's haow folks is when they git old," said Jerry, looking meditatively at the ancient beast.

"Yaas, an' ain't he for all the world like Uncle Ezry? Seems to me them two has growed to look alike, they bin so long together."

"The colts hates him 'cause he's old and 'cause he's a mule," mused Jerry, "an' he hates the colts 'cause they won't leave him have no peace."

Judith had taken from the pocket of her dress a stub of green crayon and begun to draw on the whitewashed fence post. Jerry watched her and saw the profile of Uncle Ezra appear in green on the white post, then beside it the profile of Charlie the mule. She had skilfully modified the features just enough to best bring out the points of resemblance.

"See, hain't they like as twins? They're both the same dirty gray color, both got the same hangin' under lip an' hook nose an' the same big ears."

"An' both is deaf as posts," laughed Jerry.

Judith had her back to him admiring her handiwork. He wanted to lean forward and kiss the white nape of her neck. Instead, he turned about and started off for home.

A little before Thanksgiving there came a cold, heavy rain, then a blighting frost that killed the morning glories and the geraniums and blackened everything in the garden except the beets and cabbages. A strong, cold wind blew the trees bare in a single night, and the whole aspect of the world was changed. Two days ago it had been summer. Now it was winter.

It was not so pleasant for Judith at Aunt Eppie's after the

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 cold weather came. Driven in for warmth from the deserted and windswept barnyard, she found little to interest her in the stuffy, overheated kitchen or the bare, cold bedroom that she shared with Cissy. As the days grew colder, the sitting room took the place of the porch. Here a hideous product of modernity known as a "base burner" was pressed into service. It stood on a square of ornamental zinc placed over the rag carpet and kept clean and shiny by Cissy's floor rag. It was covered with knobs and scrolls and glorious with polished nickel. All around its fat belly it had several rows of little mica windows. When a fire was lighted in this gorgeous crematory and fed with a bucket of cannel coal, mined in the neighboring state of West Virginia, it made the room so hot that Judith had to gasp for breath.

As the days grew colder, Uncle Ezra spent more and more of his time sitting silently with his feet on the fender of the majestic base burner.

The afternoons were short now, and it was night long before the chores were done. The last thing at night Judith had to milk the cows, feed the pigs and calves and shut up the chickens. When at last she came in shivering out of the dark and cold, there was no steaming hot coffee waiting to hearten her, no bacon sizzling in the pan, no biscuits fluffy and fragrant from the oven. The deserted kitchen was bleak in its chilly neatness and a leftover meal was coldly set forth on the table in the sitting room: cold vegetables and bacon left from dinner, cold biscuits and corn cakes, cold water and cold skim milk to drink, a cheerless and uninviting spread. This had been Aunt Eppie's custom from the beginning of time, and there was never any breach in its observance. As soon as the great base burner of the sitting room was put into operation, the kitchen fire was allowed to go out immediately after dinner, and it was not lighted again until next morning. Aunt Eppie, in explaining this custom, always made a great deal of the fact that it saved work for Cissy. What of course it did save was fuel. A tiny lamp set in the middle of this chill-inspiring table irritated the eyes with its feeble glare and

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 served only to make darkness visible. Aunt Eppie possessed a large, round-burner lamp with a polished nickel bowl and a "hand painted" china shade. This lamp was a present from one of her married children. She prized it greatly but never lighted its oil-consuming wick except when she had visitors of importance.

When the silent and cheerless supper was over and the dishes gathered up and washed, everybody went immediately to bed.

"Never be out o' bed at eight ner in at five," was Aunt Eppie's oft repeated motto; and winter and summer this rule was rigidly observed. In the bitter winter mornings as well as in the radiant dawns of summer, the whole family turned out at a quarter to five. They ate breakfast by lamplight. Then while Cissy and Judith washed the dishes, Aunt Eppie and Uncle Ezra sat over the base burner waiting for daylight. With no light in the room but the glow from the mica windows of the stove, the two old people sat in unbroken silence, slaves to their lifelong habit of thrift.

The dreary monotony of this manner of life soon palled upon Judith and she decided to leave Aunt Eppie's service.

"I'm a-goin' back home nex' Satiddy, Aunt Eppie," announced Judith, when one Saturday evening she received her dollar as usual.

"What, a-goin' home, Judy! There hain't nuthin fer you to do at home, an' you won't be earnin' a cent of money. What's the idee of a-goin' back home?"

Judith looked straight at Aunt Eppie with her dark, level eyes.

"I'm a-goin' home 'cause I want to," she said with unashamed simplicity.

"You'd best stay right where you are," advised Aunt Eppie. "Look at Cissy that's been a-workin' for me so long, haow well fixed she is. She's got money loaned out an' a-bringin' her in five per cent interest. You could do jes as well as her if you'd be willin' to stay here an' tend your work, 'stead o' goin' off an' a-loafin' round yer dad's place an' finally a-mar-

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 ryin' some good-fer-nuthin tenant farmer. You'd best stay here, Judy, an' learn to be a good thrifty housekeeper like Cissy."

Aunt Eppie said this last with a certain clinching finality, as though it had been quite decided that Judith was to stay. A more timid and impressionable girl might have been influenced. But Judith, heeding only her own inner promptings, could be neither tempted nor bullied by Aunt Eppie. When the following Saturday arrived she collected her dollar, packed her satchel, climbed onto a wagon that was passing on the way back from Sadieville and was jolted toward home.

Aunt Eppie looked after her with an aggrieved expression.

"That's jes haow it allus is," she remarked to the faithful Cissy, as they turned back together into the kitchen. "They hain't got no notion what's good for 'em. You no sooner get 'em trained into your ways than they're up an' gone. Thankless an' shiftless—all of 'em."

She went back to her sewing in disgust, meditating bitterly that they would now have to pay a male hired man four times what they had been paying to Judith.

Judith was glad to get back to the humbler but warmer atmosphere at home, and the folks were glad to have her back. She made Bill and the boys roar again and slap their sides with delight when she imitated Aunt Eppie's shriek of terror at the fear of the poorhouse. She spread out on the table her accumulated wealth amounting to sixteen dollars; and delighted the twins with a present of three dollars each to buy them stuff for a new dress. To Elmer she gave a dollar to buy him a popgun and reserved the rest of the money to spend riotously on clothes for herself.

"An' we'll all have new dresses for the party," exulted Lizzie May. "Poolers is a-going to have a party Christmas Eve an' we're all bid to go. But we'll have to hurry to git the dresses done."

Unable to wait a minute longer, the girls drove to Clayton first thing next morning and selected the material for their dresses. They chose cotton voile as being the prettiest, most

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 party-like material to be had for the sum that they were able to spend. Lizzie May selected a delicate pink. Luella's choice was a medium blue with darker blue shadow bars running through it. Judith's was a red and white check. They were delighted and voluble over their purchases. They felt gay and festive and full of holiday spirit, like boarding school girls on a visit home. On the way home they all tried to talk at once and laughed so much that Tom and Bob, disturbed by the unusual hilarity behind them, kept looking around inquiringly trying to see what was going on. As they jolted at a fast trot past the Pettit place, Aunt Eppie peered out of the kitchen window.

"There goes them Pippinger girls, an' I'll bet they've spent most every cent Judy's earned while she's been here," she said to Cissy, turning away from the window with her heavy money sigh. "It beats me haow extravagant an' shiftless folks kin be. They don't seem to ever have a thought that there's another day a-comin'."

That very afternoon the girls started to make their dresses. They could hardly wait to eat and wash the dishes.

On Christmas Eve, when they were dressed ready for the party, they felt somehow like different beings, as though they were not workaday people at all but ladies who had always worn new, fluffy dresses, white stockings, and shiny shoes.

It was a drive of three miles to the scene of the party. Then the mules had to be hitched to a fence post at the top of the ridge and the remaining quarter of a mile made on foot. The descent into the hollow where the Pooler house stood was too steep and narrow to attempt with a wagon at night. Tom Pooler, the father of Lizzie May's sweetheart, was a tenant of old Hiram Stone and lived in one of Hiram Stone's tenant houses. Like most of the other tenant houses in Scott County, it was built close to the acres of tobacco land with which it belonged. Proximity to the main road was a matter not taken into account.

By the light of two lanterns the Pippingers proceeded on foot down the steep, scarcely marked wagon track that led

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 to the house, the girls carefully holding up their skirts and stepping daintily so as to avoid the mud. The night was mild and bright with stars. As they walked a light wind blew in their faces and the dead leaves rustled under their feet. As they approached the house, they saw light shining not only from the windows but from many little square chinks in the walls. The reason for these little golden squares of light dated back to the building of the house several years before. Tom Pooler had made an arrangement with Old Man Stone's overseer to build the house if Stone would supply the lumber. The overseer supplied green lumber. Tom set to work briskly to build the house and soon completed the twelve by fourteen packing case which in that locality is called a house. All went well until the green boards began to shrink. Then Tom approached his landlord's manager in this wise:

"Whatcha gimme green lumber to build that 'ere house fer? The boards is shrunk naow so's a man might jes as well be a-livin' in a corn crib. You could throw a dawg through any o' them there cracks atween them shrunk boards. You'll have to gimme some more lumber to fix it, else I hain't a-goin' to stay on there nary week."

The overseer grudgingly supplied another load of lumber, with which Tom set to work to make the house tight and shipshape. This time he nailed the boards crosswise. They turned out to be as green as the first lot; and in a few months they had shrunk away from each other, leaving the house dotted with little square holes. "I'll fix that," said Tom to himself one Sunday morning, and started toward the corn crib. He soon came back with a wheelbarrow load of corn cobs and started to drive them into the holes and break off the ends. For an hour or so he worked busily driving in cobs and breaking off the ends. When he was called to dinner he surveyed the results of his work and saw that he had mended only a small patch of the great chequered expanse still gaping with holes. In the afternoon he began again, but with diminished energy. Along toward four o'clock the weariness of well doing suddenly came upon him. There were too many holes.

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 "Aw, hell, let 'er go the way she is," he muttered disgustedly, and felt in his pocket for another chew of tobacco.

It was to this house of many little golden windows that the Pippingers were now coming in the darkness. Arrived at the door, they turned their lanterns low and set them beside several other low-burning lanterns that stood in a little cluster against the house wall. Pushing open the door and entering without knock or ceremony, they found themselves in a stifling hot room crowded with people. The dim glare of two small kerosene lamps seemed a brilliant illumination after the darkness of outside; and for a moment they were dazzled.

Addie Pooler, the eldest girl, came forward and escorted Judith and the twins to a shedlike leanto back of the house where the Pooler boys slept and which was now doing duty as a dressing room. Here the four youngest Pooler children were already asleep all in one bed, two at each end, under a quilt roughly constructed of various sized pieces of dark colored goods cut from the less worn portions of men's old coats and trousers. Several sleeping babies were disposed here and there about the room on improvised beds made of overcoats or lap-robes. The girls put their coats and scarves on another large bed already piled with outdoor clothing, patted their hair a little in front of the small, face-distorting mirror over the chest of drawers, and followed Addie back into the kitchen.

Here the party was not yet under way. The women and girls and small children of both sexes were sitting or standing self-consciously about the walls. For the most part they sat bolt upright and stared straight ahead of them. Now and then they eyed each other covertly. Sometimes a woman would speak to her neighbor in a hushed voice and thus start up a small whispered conversation; but of general talk there was none. Almost all of them, daughters and mothers alike, were painfully thin, with pinched, angular features and peculiarly dead expressionless eyes. The faces of the girls wore already an old, patient, settled look, as though a black dress and a few gray hairs would make them sisters instead of daughters of the older women.

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 Tom Pooler, the host, a little man, red-faced and choleric like a bantam fighting cock, the possessor of a tremendous ego, sat in a round-backed armchair by the stove and spat tobacco juice into the wood box. His feet in heavy gray cotton socks were comfortably extended upon the fender. He was the center of a group of older men who stood and sat about the stove spitting tobacco juice and discussing the same things that they always did. The young men were nowhere to be seen. They were all standing outside with the lanterns.

All at once the door flew open and Jabez Moorhouse came in with his fiddle.

Jabez was in the best of spirits. He had taken a drop before he started, had had several pulls from the bottle on the way over to keep out the cold, and was feeling in holiday spirit. He was much in demand at gatherings like these on account of his ability to play the fiddle and call off the dances; and his response was usually a ready one. But he never went without a flask of good corn whiskey in his pocket to blur his eyes and his mind and nimble his fingers and his feelings.

"Waal, naow, gals, whatcha doin' here anyway? Settin' all raound solemn, like you was to a buryin'?"

He opened the door and held it open while he called out into the darkness:

"Hi there, you backward young fellers! Air you a-goin' to set aout on the doorstep with the dawgs all night? Come along in here an' pick yer gals fer the fu'st dance."

They came pouring in, elbowing and shoving each other and uttering loud guffaws to cover their embarrassment. They were healthier and less angular than the girls and the look of premature age had not been stamped upon their features.

"Naow then, you good lookin' gals, git up onto the floor; an' if a partner don't pick you, you pick a partner. This here is leap year anyway. Besides it's allus the wimmin that picks the men, though they try to make out it hain't. I say every gal that wants to git a good man step out onto the floor. An' every gal that wants to stay a old maid keep a-settin' by her mammy."

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 Nobody was offended by the crassness of Jabez' exhortation. It was what they had all been waiting for. This crude joviality and the smell of corn whiskey that was beginning to pervade the atmosphere soon cured the young fellows of their bashfulness, and there was much pulling and pushing of the girls from their seats, which they pretended to wish to retain.

Jabez had stationed himself in a corner and was tuning his fiddle.

"Naow then, all aboard! Form a line daown the middle; a lady an' a gent, a lady an' a gent. Gents to the right, ladies to the lef'. Swing yer partners."

He broke into the tune of one of the square dances familiar in that neighborhood, and the feet of the young men and girls followed him. Awkwardly and haltingly enough they stepped the first figure. The girls, with their angularities sticking out of their skimpy, ill-fitting dresses, moved at first as though from the pulling of wires. The young men slumped and floundered, lost their partners and got tangled up in the chain of dancers and had to be untangled again. As they warmed to the music, however, the feet lightened, the arms limbered, and self-consciousness was forgotten.

The men about the stove kept the fire well stoked and the room grew hotter and hotter, especially to the dancers. Dance followed upon dance. Tobacco smoke and the fumes of corn whiskey filled the stale air. The cheeks of every one were blazing from the heat and closeness. The children in the chairs were all asleep, leaning against their mothers. The older men in the corner by the stove watched the dancers and talked and spat tobacco juice into the wood box. They spat so much tobacco juice that the wood was covered with it. Fortunately it was the spitters who had the job of putting the wood into the stove, so it was their own affair. For the dancing girls in their slippers and light dresses, their feet and hearts beating time to the music, the spit encrusted wood box did not exist. With the beautiful ability of youth to ignore the ugly and sordid, however near at hand, they danced and laughed

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 and coquetted with their partners, feeling in this their hour far removed above the humdrum of their lives.

The two prettiest girls in the room were Bill Pippinger's daughters, Lizzie May and Judith. Lizzie May, with her pale pink dress, cornsilk hair and small, dainty features, made one think of a wild rose. Dan Pooler could not take his eyes from her and insisted on being her partner in every dance, until toward the end of the evening the two disappeared entirely from the dancing floor. Judith in red and white shone in her dark loveliness like a poppy among weeds. Something more than her beauty set her apart from the others: an ease and naturalness of movement, a freedom from constraint, a completeness of abandon to the fun and merrymaking, to which these daughters of toil in their most hectic moments could never attain. Somehow, in spite of her ancestry, she had escaped the curse of the soil, else she could never have known how to be so free, so glad, so careless and joyous.

This difference from the other girls singled her out for comment more than once; and the comment was always adverse, less from maliciousness than from lack of comprehension; although envy, naturally enough, was not absent.

"My sakes, Judy Pippinger'd otta think shame to herse'f," whispered Jenny Whitmarsh to Esther Pooler, "the way she goes on with the fellers!"

"If Judy's poor mammy was alive, she wouldn't like to see her a-goin' on in that way," sighed Aunt Mary Blackford to Aunt Maggie Slatten. "That way o' carryin' on ain't a-goin' to bring her to no good."

The men about the stove had by this time passed the bottle several times and were filled with good feeling and reminiscences, as they watched the dancers passing in a far-off blur. The young men too had occasionally slipped aside to enjoy a swig with a companion, and were becoming bolder and more demonstrative in the dance. From time to time the talk of one of them slipped past the bounds of the decent and caused the cheeks of his partner to flush still redder.

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 As they danced the old game of "Skip to ma Loo," everybody sang noisily:

In the pauses of the dance, the voices of the men about the stove could be heard growing louder and more vociferous, as the bottles became lighter.

Aunt Nannie Pooler, a wizened, bent little woman, the mother of eleven, now began to spread out the refreshments on a table in a corner. Some of the older women got up and assisted her. The Poolers were noted for their improvidence and their lavishness in entertaining. Soon the table was spread with layer cakes, cookies, corn cakes and plates of cold fried chicken. The smell of bad coffee boiling on the stove had permeated the room for some time. It was now poured into cups, mugs, bowls, glasses, anything that would hold liquid, and the guests invited to step up and partake.

"Yaas, we eat at our haouse," Tom Pooler's voice could be heard saying loudly. "An' anybody comes in our doors, neighbor or stranger, goes away with his belly full."

"Whose hencoop d'ye reckon old man Pooler reached this fried chicken out'n?" asked Edd Whitmarsh of young Bob Crupper, when the two had retired to the back stoop to enjoy chicken washed down by a swig of whiskey.

"Whosever it was he had 'em fed fat," answered Bob, devouring a piece of the breast with great satisfaction. "I sholy

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 do love a fat chicken. I kinder hope the joke was on Uncle Ezry."

With the leg of a chicken in one hand and a corn cake in the other, Jabez, now blissfully intoxicated, stood beside the table and rallied the girls as they came up. Most of them were too excited to care for food and Jabez knew it.

"Waal naow, Judy, my gal, hain't you a-goin' to do nothin' but nibble at a half of a wing, like you was a mouse on a pantry shelf? I seen you a-dancin' that fast an' a-laughin' that hard, a body'd think you'd be clean wore out an' a-needin' vittles. If you'd worked that hard at the washtub, I'll bet you'd be a-wantin' to eat a' right."

Judith's cheeks were scarlet and her dark eyes blazing. She looked at him from under her straight black eyebrows with the peculiar level gaze of hers. Even in the excitement of the moment there was something calm and critical, almost cold in that clear, unwavering look. She had always resented the self-appointed privilege of the old to make sport of the young.

"When you was seventeen did you eat hearty at parties, Uncle Jabez?"

Jabez did not notice the question. "Land, Judy," he said meditatively, "it makes a body feel old to see haow quick you young uns grows up. It seems like only day afore yestiddy you was a little brat a-crawlin' raound on the kitchen floor. When I'd step into yer dad's to see about borryin' a tool or gittin' shoes put onto a hoss, I'd have to walk careful to keep from settin' my foot daown on yuh. An' naow here ye be a tall, growed young leddy; an' if there's a handsomer gal in Scott County I'd like to have her showed to me."

Just then Jerry Blackford came up, grabbed Judith on both sides of her red and white checked waist and whisked her away to another corner of the room.

The music and dancing began again after Jabez had finished his chicken leg and ended in a wild, helter-skelter scramble, the young men chasing the girls around and around the room, catching them and kissing them with loud, resounding smacks.

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 The girls exchanged slaps for kisses, and the sound of female fingers ringing on male cheeks peppered the air.

"Young folks to the wall; ole folks to the middle," called out the voice of Jabez. "This is dad's an' mammy's turn naow. Step out here you ole timers an' show the young uns haow we used to dance when we was lads an' gals."

Tom Pooler could be heard pulling his shoes out from under the stove.

"Yaas, by gollies, let's show 'em haow we done a barn dance. We hain't so stiff with rheumatics but what we kin step a figger yet, hey, Nannie?"

The other men about the stove shambled after Tom to the middle of the floor. The older women, exhorted by their daughters and husbands, were at last persuaded to forsake their chairs and join the circle.

Although nearly all of the "old folks" were under fifty and most of them in the thirties and forties, it was a scarecrow array of bent limbs, bowed shoulders, sunken chests, twisted contortions, and jagged angularities, that formed the circle for the old folks' dance. Grotesque in their deformities, these men and women, who should have been in the full flower of their lives, were already classed among the aged. And old they were in body and spirit. It was only on such rare occasions as this that the stimulation of social feeling and corn whiskey incited them to try to imitate with Punch and Judy antics the natural gaiety of youth.

"Yaas, we'll teach 'em haow to step a dance," cried Andy Blackford, the father of Jerry, floundering into the wrong place in the chain and grabbing the wrong partner with his great, seamy, wart-covered hands. "This is haow we done it in the old days, hain't it, Aunt Susie?"

The skinny, dried-up, little women in their black dresses and white aprons did not get much enjoyment out of the dance. There was neither lure nor mystery about the other sex for them any more; and they were disgusted and nauseated by the foul whiskey breath that spewed out upon them from their partners' mouths. The thought of the hard-earned money

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 thrown away upon said whiskey did not tend to make them more cheerful. They went through the dance as they had gone through everything else since childhood, as a matter of course, because the circumstances of their lives demanded it of them.

Toward the close of the dance, Tom Pooler fell sprawling upon the floor. The drink had gone to his legs as well as to his head. He took the fall as an unwarranted insult to his dignity and scrambled to his feet flushed with whiskey, importance and indignation.

"I tell ye, I'm a baar in the woods, I am. Nobody don't dass say nuthin to Tom Pooler that he don't wanta hear—not Ezry Pettit ner Hiram Stone ner none of 'em. I don't take no sass from nobody no matter haow much land they got. I bet I cud lick any man in Scott County. I tell ye I'm a baar in the woods."

"You shet up yer mouth, ye dern ole fool an' don't git to quarrelin' in yer own house. Whatcha drink all that whiskey fer?" admonished Aunt Nannie in a loud whisper close to his ear. He glared at her with small, fiery, bloodshot eyes, like an angry old boar at bay. She met the glare firmly and calmly. Under her cold gaze that had restrained him so many times before he calmed down. But for a long time he kept muttering to himself: "I'm a baar in the woods, I am. Yaas, sir, I'm a baar in the woods."

The young people had paid no attention to the dancing of their elders. They had slipped away into corners and were absorbed in their own affairs.

The party was over with the old folks' dance. There was much sorting out of clothing, wrapping up of sleeping babies and shaking of older children to get them wide enough awake to walk to the wagons. No one told the host and hostess that they had enjoyed themselves; such things went without saying. When the Pippingers were all ready to start and had at last selected their own lanterns out of the bewildering cluster by the door, Lizzie May was not to be found anywhere. They waited and called. By and by she appeared around the corner

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 of the house; she had been saying good-by to Dan. She seemed flustered and excited.

After they had reached the wagon and were driving along the ridge road, they heard Jabez, who was striding home across fields, singing ebulliently as he walked:

The night was still, mild and bright with stars. There was a clean smell of earth and dried leaves. The song came across the fields out of the darkness, rich, clear and mellow. A soft, cool wind blew in their heated faces; and the stars twinkled down through the tracery of bare treetops.

"Ain't Uncle Jabez awful!" sighed Luella, snuggling down into the straw. "He kin play the fiddle good; but land he does use sech langridge."

"Oh, don't think yerse'f so nice, Elly," snapped Judith, who had loved the sound of the singing. "His langridge hain't no worse'n other men folks'. On'y the song hain't true, 'cause a coon kin climb a tree jes as good as a possum any day."

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could hardly wait till she was alone with her sisters in their attic bedroom to tell them that Dan Pooler had asked her to marry him. They were going to try to go to housekeeping in the spring.

The following Sunday afternoon when Dan and Lizzie May were out driving, Jerry Blackford came over to the Pippinger place. There was nothing unusual about this. Since they were mere babies the Blackford boys, Andy and Jerry, had been in the habit of coming over to play with the Pippingers. This time, however, Jerry came alone. And instead of being in overalls and torn shirt, he was wearing his new brown mail order suit, a black derby hat, a "biled" shirt, and a resplendent tie of red and green stripes. He walked up the wagon drive, hesitated for the fraction of a second before the little picket gate that led into the dooryard of the house, then walked on into the barnyard. Here he found Bill, Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, and Uncle Amos Crupper sitting on the chopping log chewing, whittling, and spitting. It was late December, but the day was mild and the sunshine pleasant to sit in. A Sabbath afternoon calm permeated the pale sunshine and the still, birdless air. A few crows cawing reproachfully over the stubble of the deserted cornfield, only intensified the silence. Between the men and the barn, Craw and Elmer were playing a game of catch with a homemade ball of twisted rubber and string.

"Where be ye a-goin' in yer Sunday clothes, Jerry?" inquired old Amos Crupper, looking up from his whittling.

"No place."

"Aw, come on naow," rallied Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, with a twinkle in his keen gray eyes. "A young feller don't stretch on his Sunday best jes to tramp the roads. You're a-goin' sparkin' some gal."

"I hain't neither. I'm a-goin to hev a game o' ketch with

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 Craw an' Elmer. Come on, Craw, pitch 'er to me, an' we'll make it a three-handed game."

By and by Judith came out to the well to get a bucket of water. Jerry glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye as she worked the pump handle up and down. But he was careful not to turn his head in her direction.

"Jerry Blackford's aout there in all his Sunday clothes a-playin' ketch with the boys," she announced to Luella, as she set the bucket down. "I wonder where he's been to."

Jerry played catch until it was chore time. Then he went home, passing the house with his head turned in the opposite direction. Judith and Luella, peering out of the kitchen window, saw him go.

For four successive Sundays Jerry repeated this performance. By the second Sunday the girls had formed a pretty shrewd notion of the reason for his peculiar behavior.

"I'm jes a-goin' to set still an' see haow long he keeps it up," said Judith wickedly, as she sat by the kitchen window trimming a hat with peacock feathers that had molted from the tail of Aunt Eppie's peacock. "I'm a-goin' to sew the feathers all raound an' raound the brim, Elly; an' then have some a-droppin' daown behind. Won't it make a nice hat?"

The longer Jerry continued to come on Sundays in his best clothes, the more amusement he provided for Judith. She felt gratified by his attentions; but she took no interest in him any more than in any of the other young fellows of the neighborhood, with all of whom she dearly loved to coquette. So she was not at all impatient at this slow courtship. She liked to go out and draw water or hang something on the line in order to see Jerry turn his head away from her. Often she found it necessary to go into the barnyard to feed the chickens or slop the hogs; and would stop and exchange a few casual words with him for the pleasure of watching his embarrassment and enjoying his discomfiture when she turned away.

On the fourth Sunday, as Jerry was hanging about the barnyard with the boys, he saw Dick Whitmarsh drive up to the Pippinger door in a newly-washed buggy. In a few moments

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 he was galvanized to see Judith come out, radiant in her Sunday best, with the peacock hat glowing iridescently above her black hair. She and Dick got into the buggy and drove gaily away.

Jerry went home almost immediately, feeling like a small rooster that has been chased out of the cornfield by a larger one. He savagely pulled off his good clothes, put on his comfortable old overalls, went out to the barn and fell to cursing and currying the horses with all his might.

The next Sunday Jerry appeared in the Pippinger wagon drive very early in the afternoon. He was driving Jinny, the spirited four-year-old bay mare; and the Blackford family buggy was washed and polished to resplendence.

"Hey, Judy!" he shouted in loud, careless-like fashion from the buggy seat.

He had to shout three or four times before the door at last opened and Judith appeared on the threshold.

"Say, Judy, wanta come—ahem—fer a little drive?"

Jerry was so much embarrassed that he choked in the middle of the invitation and had to clear his throat.

"I'd like to go all right, Jerry; but I promised Dick Whitmarsh I'd go with him this afternoon."

"But—uh—I'm here first, hain't I?" countered Jerry, beginning to feel indignant.

"Waal, s'pose you air! No little bird told me you was a-fixin' to come. An' I promised Dick las' Sunday I'd go with him agin to-day."

"Waal, I'll be damned!"

Jerry muttered this to himself, staring straight before him with blank, unseeing, disappointed eyes.

By this time the whole Pippinger family had collected in the dooryard and were looking at Jerry, the glossy bay mare and the newly washed buggy with the intentness with which children regard a circus parade. He looked up from his blank stare at nothing and encountered their six pairs of eyes all fixed upon him with cool, dispassionate appraisal. Then he caught a glimmer of amusement in Bill's eye and Craw winked at him

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 significantly. He felt like a grasshopper impaled on a darning needle with a circle of boys watching its efforts to escape.

The sound of buggy wheels rattling through the Pippinger gateway made him turn his head; and he saw Dick Whitmarsh driving in.

He passed with his head down and his eyes on the dashboard and made no response to Dick's cheery "Howdy, Jerry." When he was out on the road, he turned the mare's head in the opposite direction from home, whipped her up into a gallop and used freely in muttered imprecations all the bad language that he had ever heard.

About two miles away he saw ahead of him the great gaunt figure of Jabez Moorhouse stalking along the roadside. He had slowed up by this time and was feeling somewhat calmer.

"Git in an' ride, Uncle Jabez," he said, pulling up beside his former working companion.

Jabez clambered into the buggy and disposed his long legs as best he could. He was slightly under the influence of corn whiskey and the smell of it was upon his breath. He pulled out a bottle from his hip pocket.

"Have a drink, Jerry," he said, handing it to the younger man.

Jerry took a long pull at the bottle.

"Where be you a-goin' in yer good clothes, with yer buggy an' mare all slicked up so neat?"

"No place."

"Aw, don't go to tellin' me that. I been a young feller too in my day. What gal air you a-sparkin', Jerry?"

"No gal."

"Jerry, 'tain't no youst fer the young to try to hide things from the old. They been through it all. You might as well own up you're on the track o' some wench. What's her name?"

"Aw, shet up, Uncle Jabez. You know I hain't a-sparkin' no gal."

Jerry looked straight ahead of him at the moving haunches of the mare.

"Have another drink, Jerry."

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 Jerry took another long pull at the bottle, and felt much better. Jabez also helped himself before returning the bottle to his pocket.

"Jerry," went on Jabez, after a long silence. "The old likes to give advice to the young—not that they look to see 'em take it o' course. For, as the Bible says, they got ears but they hear not. Jes the same, even if I'm a-talkin' to deaf ears, I gotta have my say. Jerry, don't have nothin' to do with wimmin. I've had a right smart of experience with 'em, an' I kin tell yuh, an' it's the livin' truth, all wimmin is harlots."

Jerry stirred uneasily and seemed about to open his mouth.

"It's the livin' truth, Jerry, my boy." Jabez' vague blue eyes took on a prophetic look, as though he were a seer of old exhorting the heedless to look to their ways; and his deep voice fell into the rhythmic chant of the inspired man. "Don't go after none of 'em, I tell yuh. Wimmin'll deal treacherously with yuh, Jerry. Their lips drops honey an' their mouths is smoother'n oil; but in the end they're bitter as wormwood an' sharper'n a two-edged sword. The Bible says so, Jerry; but that hain't the way I found it out. Yaas, Jerry, they're all deceitful. They'll all eat an' wipe their mouths an' say they hain't done no sin. Keep yerse'f clean of 'em, my boy."

"All wimmin hain't harlots," answered Jerry slowly and with conviction.

There was something in what Jerry said and his way of saying it that brought Jabez back to the matter of fact.

"Aw, hell," he laughed, in the tone of one descended suddenly to earth, "what youst to tell a husky young buck like you not to go after the wimmin? Might as well speak to the grass an' tell it not to grow in May. Have another drink, Jerry."

They each took another long pull at the bottle and then drove for some time in silence.

"Is she dark or fair, Jerry?" asked Jabez out of the silence.

"She's dark," admitted Jerry, the mellowing influence of the whiskey beginning to overcome his boyish bashfulness and natural taciturnity. "But her skin hain't dark. On'y her

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 eyes an' hair is dark. Her skin is all creamy colored an' her cheeks is pink like brier roses. No, not like brier roses—a pinker pink—more like peach blossoms."

"Huh," grunted Jabez thoughtfully. Tain't Judy Pippinger, is it?"

"Yump." Then after a pause, "Would yuh say Judy Pippinger was a harlot?" Jerry looked belligerently at Jabez.

The older man was too surprised by the question even to notice the young fellow's attitude of challenge. He gave a start of shocked astonishment.

"A harlot! My gawd no, Jerry. Judy Pippinger hain't but a little gal! I allus liked that little gal. She seems more like a boy. It's on'y lately she's begun to know she's a gal an' not a boy. Too bad she hain't a boy."

He fell silent for a time, musing.

"Waal, haow's the courtin' a-comin' on?" he asked at last. "Is the day set yet?"

"No, it hain't."

Jerry's face assumed an expression of sullen disgruntlement. Jabez looked at him keenly out of the corner of his eye.

"Have another drink, Jerry."

Both men had another drink, and there fell another long period of silence.

"Where's the hitch, Jerry?" asked Jabez at last.

By this time the whiskey had thoroughly warmed Jerry through and through. The landscape was beginning to look blurred and far away; and he felt shut in with Jabez in a warm atmosphere of congeniality and comradeship. He began, haltingly at first, to tell his friend his troubles. Gradually his trickle of speech flowed more freely; then burst suddenly forth, like a stream that has broken a dam, and rushed in a torrent of picturesque curses on the head of Dick Whitmarsh.

Jabez laughed the loud, carefree laugh of inebriation.

"Why, Jerry, you bin a heap too backward," he cried, slapping his friend on the back till Jerry winced, "an' Dick Whitmarsh has sure got the start of you naow. The on'y thing fer you to do is to come up on him from another d'rection an'

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 s'prise the enemy when he hain't a-lookin' fer yuh. Not all the courtin' is done in buggies, Jerry; though a feller born an' bred in Scott County might think so. It don't have to be done in buggies. An' Judy Pippinger 'specially hain't a gal to be courted in a buggy. You go to meetin' her accidentally when she's a-drivin' up the caows or a-stalkin' them turkeys over the hills an' hollers, an' I'll bet you'll ketch up with Dick in no time, even if he has got a head start. If yuh must go a-courtin', as I s'pose yuh must, yuh might as well go in fer to win. Good luck, Jerry!"

They had reached Jabez' house, a melancholy little weathered frame shanty shaded by two sorrowful hemlock trees that stood out blackly against the gray sky. Jabez leapt from the buggy.

Jerry turned the mare's head toward home. Knowing where she was going, she fell into a fast trot without any encouragement. The short winter day was already graying to a close and it was chore time. As he drove along over the half frozen ruts of the road, his imagination was aflame with the suggestions that Jabez had thrown out. The corn whiskey gave warmth and color to these imaginings.

The effect of the corn whiskey soon wore off, but not of Jabez' suggestions; and Jerry was now in no mood for delay. He had held off quite long enough, he told himself. The very next evening, as Judith was driving up Spot and Blackie, the successors of Roanie and Reddie, Jerry met her coming along the ridge path. She had on Craw's cloth cap, an old canvas coat of her father's and Craw's rubber boots. Shining out from this rough frame, her girlish charms looked all the more alluring to Jerry.

"Howdy, Jerry. Where you a-goin?"

"I'm a-lookin' fer our red an' white heifer. She's strayed away some place an' we hain't see hair ner hide of her since yestiddy mornin'."

"I didn't see no signs of a strange caow back yonder. But mebbe she's there. If she is she'll be in the holler by Uncle Jonah Cobb's place, 'cause you kin see all the rest from the

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 ridge. Well, I gotta be a-gittin' on. Git along there, Blackie. It'll be dark afore I git milked. Good-by, Jerry."

"I don't reckon she's in the holler. Anyway it'd be too dark to see her agin I got there. I guess I'll go on back home."

He turned and walked by Judith's side.

They walked along the ridge path together behind the cows. Neither of them spoke a word. Before they reached the Pippinger barnyard, Jerry vaulted a rail fence and went off toward home across fields. Judith looking after him noticed with what agility he leapt the fence and how light and springy was his step as he strode away across the deserted corn fields. Yes, she admitted to herself, he was, as Lizzie May had said, much better looking than Dick Whitmarsh. On the whole she thought she liked him better than Dick.

The next evening he met her in the same place.

"Howdy, Jerry. You still a-searchin' for that red an' white heifer?"

She looked at him with laughing challenge in her dark eyes. Instantly he was put at ease by this frank admission of things as they really were. She had placed him where he wanted to be. He turned and walked beside her.

On the third evening he took her hand in his and they walked along together swinging the joined hands between them like two children. Her restless, work-hardened hand, neither small nor delicate, nestled comfortably in Jerry's large, warm palm. There was something comforting, something restful and satisfying about that firm, enfolding male pressure. Her hand, lying in his, felt relaxed and at peace, like a child rocked by its mother.

On the fourth evening it was raining in a fine, mild drizzle. The damp air made Judith's fresh pink cheeks fresher and pinker. Last year's dead leaves were soggy under their feet. In a little grove of second growth maples and beeches, Jerry released her hand and slipped his arm around her waist underneath the coarse old canvas coat. The exquisite curve of her body intoxicated him. A surge of desire swept over him and he took her in his arms and kissed her passionately on the lips.

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 She kissed him back with answering passion. For a long time they stood together in the soft drizzle, the shade of the beeches and maples deepening about them into twilight gloom.

It was all easy after that for Jerry. It was a speedy, simple, natural courting, like the coming together of two young wild things in the woods. Jerry, who was of a practical turn of mind, immediately began to plan for their future.

"I think I'll sign a contract with old Hiram Stone for next year, Judy," he said to her one spring evening, when they had met down by the brook in the hollow, a spot that they had chosen as a trysting place. "It's too late to get any land for this year. But next first of March we'll move into a little home of our own. Won't that be nice, Judy?"

"I dunno if it'll be nice or not," doubted Judy, looking straight at him. "I hain't never been very fond of keepin' house, Jerry."

She had a disconcerting way of stating a disagreeable fact quite baldly and then nailing it to his consciousness by looking him through and through with those clear, level, gray eyes of hers. He felt saddened and frustrated by her lack of enthusiasm for the little home on which he had pondered so fondly. Instinct told him what to do on such an occasion. He took her in his arms, kissed her, fondled her, made her love him. Then the feeling of unity came back and they were at peace again.

"You know," he went on, "old man Stone has got the best land anywheres around here. An' if I kin raise about five acres of tobacco on his ground, we'll be able to lay by a little money, Judy. An' after a few years we kin buy us a little place of our own. I don't want to be like all these poor devils that lives all their lives from hand to mouth a-workin' on somebody's else's ground an' never havin' a foot o' land that they kin call their own. It hain't no way to live, Judy. You an' I'll do better'n that. I want to own my own place; so if I don't like a feller's looks I kin tell him to git off of it."

Jerry took on a male and belligerent expression. Judith looked at him and laughed mockingly.

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