gleam in his eyes. But she had turned her face and steps
in the opposite direction, the mirth of the situation extinguished for
the present.

"Quit talkin' that-a-way 'bout sech turr'ble, turr'ble things!" she
cried petulantly, making a motion as if to strike him, futile at the
distance, and with her frowning face averted.

"Sech ez yer new coat? I 'lowed 't war the apple o' yer eye," he
rejoined with a feint of banter.

She held her face down, with her features drawn and her eyes half
closed, rejecting the vision of recollection as if it were the sight
itself. "I can't abide the name o' cor'ner's jury,--I never wants ter
hear it nor see it agin! I never shall furgit how them men all looked
a-viewin' the traveler's body what I fund dead in the road; they
looked like jes' so many solemn, peekin', heejus black buzzards
crowdin' aroun' the corpse; then a-noddin' an' a-whisperin' tergether,
an' a-findin' of a verdic' ez they called it. They fund nuthin' at
all. 'T war _me_ ez done the findin'. I fund the man dead in the road.
An' _I_ ain't a-goin' ter be a witness no mo'. Nex' time the law wants
me fur a witness I'll go ter jail; it's cheerfuller, a heap, I'll
bet!"

As she still held her head down, her bonnet well on it now, her face
with its _riant_ cast of features incongruously woebegone,
overshadowed by the tragedy she recounted even more definitely than by
the brim of her headgear or the first gray advance of the dusk, he
made a clumsy effort to divert her attention.

"I 'lowed ye war mightily in favor of juries; ye talk mighty nigh all
day 'bout the jury of view."

"I want a road up hyar," she exclaimed vivaciously, raising her eyes
and her joyous transfigured face, "a reg'lar county road! In the fall
o' the year the folks would kem wagonin' thar chestnuts over ter sell
in town, an' camp out. An' all the mounting would go up an' down it
past our big gate ter the church house in the Cove. I'd never want ter
hear no mo' preachin'. I'd jes' set on our front porch, an' look, an'
look, an' look!"

She cast up her great bright eyes with as vivid and immediate an
irradiation as if the brilliant procession which she pictured deployed
even now, chiefly in ox-wagons, before them. She caught off her bonnet
from her head,--it seemed a sort of moral barometer; she never wore it
when the indications of the inner atmosphere set fair. She swung it
gayly by one string as she walked and talked; now and again she held
the str