ous
creature she was!

"I never see the beat o' that girl," Mrs. Motherwell would say. "Them
eyes of hers were always red with homesickness, and there was no reason
for it in the world, her gettin' more wages than she ever got before,
and more'n she was earnin', as I often told her. Land! the way that
girl would sing when she had got a letter from home, the queerest songs
ye ever heard:

Down by the biller there grew a green willer,
Weeping all night with the bank for a piller.

Well, I had to stop her at last," Mrs. Motherwell would tell you with
an apologetic swallow, which showed that even generous people have to
be firm sometimes in the discharge of unpleasant duties.

"And, mind you," Mrs. Motherwell would go on, with a grieved air, "just
as the busy time came on didn't she up and take the fever--you never
can depend on them English girls--and when the doctor was outside there
in the buggy waitin' for her--he took her to the hospital--I declare if
we didn't find her blubberin' over them poppies, and not a flower on
them no mor'n nothing."

Sam Motherwell and his wife were nominally Presbyterians. At the time
that the Millford Presbyterian Church was built Sam had given
twenty-five dollars toward it, the money having been secured in some
strange way by the wiles of Purvis Thomas, the collector. Everybody was
surprised at Sam's prodigality. The next year, a new collector--for
Purvis Thomas had gone away--called on Mr. Motherwell.

The grain was just beginning to show a slight tinge of gold. It was one
of those cloudless sunshiny days in the beginning of August, when a
faint blue haze lies on the Tiger Hills, and the joy of being alive
swells in the breast of every living thing. The creek, swollen with the
July rain, ran full in its narrow channel, sparkling and swirling over
its gravelly bed, and on the green meadow below the house a herd of
shorthorns contentedly cropped the tender after-grass.

In the farmyard a gigantic turkey-gobbler marched majestically with
arched neck and spreading wings, feeling himself very much the king of
the castle; good-natured ducks puddled contentedly in a trough of dirty
water; pigeons, white winged and graceful, circled and wheeled in the
sunshine; querulous-voiced hens strutted and scratched, and gossiped
openly of mysterious nests hidden away.

Sam stood leaning on a pitchfork in front of the barn door. He was a
stout man of about fifty years of age, with an ox-like