the surrounding wood, as if marked by a silver light
falling from the topmost branches. The hoarse, grating notes of
jar-flies intensified the stillness.

Nicholas went on steadily, spurred by superstitious terror of the
silence. He remembered that Uncle Ish had said there were no "ha'nts"
along this road, but the assurance was barren of comfort. Old Uncle
Dan'l Mule had certainly seen a figure in a white sheet rise up out of
that decayed oak stump in the hollow, for he had sworn to it in the
boy's presence in Aunt Rhody Sand's cabin the night of her daughter
Viny's wedding. As for Viny's husband Saul, he had declared that one
night after ten o'clock, when he was coming through this wood, the
"booger-boos" had got after him and chased him home.

At the end of the wood the road came out upon the open again, and in
the distance Nicholas could see, like burnished squares, the windows of
his father's house. Between the thicket and the house there was a long
stretch of clearing, which had been once planted in corn, and now
supported a headless army of dry stubble, amid a dull-brown waste of
broomsedge. The last pale vestige of the afterglow, visible across the
level country, swept the arid field and softened the harsh outlines of
the landscape. It was barren soil, whose strength had been exhausted
long since by years of production without returns, tilled by hands that
had forced without fertilising. There was now grim pathos in its
absolute sterility, telling as it did of long-gone yields of grain and
historic harvests.

Nicholas skirted the waste, and was turning into the pasture gate on the
opposite side of the road, when he heard the shrill sound of a voice
from the direction of the house.

"Nick!--who--a Nick!"

On one of the cedar posts of the fence of the cow-pen he discerned the
small figure and green cotton frock of his half-sister, Sarah Jane, who
was shouting through her hollowed palms to increase the volume of sound.

"I say, Nick! The she-ep hev' been driv-en u-p! Come to sup-per!"

She vanished from the post and Nicholas ran up the remainder of the road
and swung himself over the little gate which led into the small square
yard immediately surrounding the house. At the pump near the back door
his father, who had just come from work, was washing his hands before
going into supper, and near a row of pointed chicken coops the three
younger children were "shooing" up the tiny yellow broods. The yard was
unk