y down which he had noisily twisted his
enormous figure, with some amusement, as always, had brought him to the
dining room. This was situated between the kitchen and his father's and
mother's bedroom. The door of each of these stood ajar, and some of the
warmth of the stove on one side and of the grate on the other dried and
tempered the atmosphere.

His mother sat in her place at the head of the table, quietly waiting
for him, and still holding in one hand the partially eaten biscuit As
he took his seat, she rose, and, walking listlessly to the kitchen
door, made a listless request of one of the two negro women. When the
coffee had been brought in, standing, she poured out a cup, sweetened,
stirred, and tasted it, and putting the spoon into it, placed it before
him. Then she resumed her seat (and the biscuit) and looked on,
occasionally scrutinizing his face, with an expression perhaps the most
tragic that can ever be worn by maternal eyes: the expression of a
lowly mother who has given birth to a lofty son, and who has neither
the power to understand him, nor the grace to realize her own
inferiority.

She wore, as usual, a dress of plain mourning, although she had not the
slightest occasion to mourn--at least, from the matter of death. In the
throat of this was caught a large, thin, oval-shaped breastpin,
containing a plait of her own and her husband's hair, braided together;
and through these there ran a silky strand cut from David's head when
an infant, and long before the parents discovered how unlike their
child was to themselves. This breastpin, with the hair of the three
heads of the house intertwined, was the only symbol in all the world of
their harmony or union.

Around her shoulders she had thrown, according to her wont, a home-knit
crewel shawl of black and purple. Her hair, thick and straight and
pasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a long-used
wig. Her contracted face seemed to have accumulated the wrinkles of the
most drawn-out, careworn life. Yet she was not old; and these were not
the lines of care; for her years had been singularly uneventful
and--for her--happy. The markings were, perhaps, inherited from the
generations of her weather-beaten, toiling, plain ancestors--with the
added creases of her own personal habits. For she lived in her house
with the regularity and contentment of an insect in a dead log. And few
causes age the body faster than such wilful indolence and m