naught moved now save the imperceptible lengthening of the shadows. It
had never occurred to her to deem the scene beautiful; it was the
familiar furniture of her home. Upon this her eyes had first opened.
She had never thought to compare it to aught else,--to the suffocating
experience of one visit to the metropolitan glories of the little town
in the flat woods known as Colbury. It had seemed, indeed, magnificent
to her ignorance, and the temerity of the architecture of a two-story
house had struck her aghast. She had done naught but wonder and stare.
The trip had been a great delight, but she had never desired to linger
or to dwell there. Certain sordid effects came over her; reminiscences
of the muddy streets, the tawdry shops, the jostling, busy-eyed
people.

"Ain't this ez good?" she said to herself, as the vast scene suddenly
fluctuated beneath a flare of wind amidst the sunshine, and light,
detached white flakes of cloud went winging athwart the blue sky;
their shadows followed them fast across the sunlit valley,--only their
dark and lifeless semblances, like the verbal forms of some white
illumined thought that can find no fit expression in words. The breath
of the pines came to her, the sound of the water, the sudden fanfare
of the unseen wind in the sky heralding the clouds. "Ain't this ez
good?" she said again, with that first deadly, subtle distrust of the
things of home, that insidious discontent so fatal to peace. He
evidently did not deem it as good, and the obvious fact rankled in
her. The mountain men, and their lack of enterprise, and their
drawling speech which he had mimicked,--they too shared his
disparagement; and she was conscious that she herself did not now
think so well of them,--so conscious that she made a loyal struggle
against this sentiment.

"So shif'less, so thrif'less," she echoed his words. "An' I dunno ez
_I_ ever viewed a waste-fuller critter'n this hyar very Mister Man."
She stooped down, gathering together the handful of matches that
Selwyn had inadvertently pulled from his pocket with the one which he
had used in illustrating his suggestion of setting the waters of a
spring afire. "Ef he keeps on ez wasteful ez this, he'll get out o'
matches whar he lives over yander; an' I misdoubts ef, smart ez he
'lows he be, he could kindle the wood ter cook his breakfus' by a
flint rock,--ef he air so boastful ez ter 'low ez he kin set spring
water afire."

She made the matches into a c