about in winter-evening gossip at the mountain-cabin firesides;
realms where men were courteous to women, careful in their speech; where
women did not work, but sat on silken chairs with black menials ready to
their call to serve their slightest wish; where maidens were not clad as
she was clad, and every woman she had ever known was clad, in calico or
linsey-woolsey homespun, but richly, wondrously, in silks and satins,
laces, beaded gew-gaws. In her imagination's picture, the maids and
matrons of the bluegrass were as marvellous, as fascinating, as are the
fairies and the sprites of Anderson and Grimm to girls more fortunately
placed. No tale of elf born from a cleft rock, touched by magic wand,
ever more completely fascinated any big-eyed city child, than did the
tales which Layson told her--commonplace and ordinary to his mind: mere
casual account of routine life--about his family and friends down in the
bluegrass, the enchanted region separated from them where they sat by a
hundred miles or so of rugged hills and billowing forests. Her eager
questions especially drew from him with a greed insatiable account of
all the gayeties of that mysterious existence.

"And that aunt of yours--Muss Aluth--Aluth--"

"Miss Alathea Layson?" he inquired, and smiled.

"Yes; what queer names the women have, down there! Is she pretty? Does
_she_ dress in silks and satins, too, like the girls that go to them big
dances?"

He laughed. "None of them are always dressed in silks and satins," he
replied. "Perhaps I've given you a wrong idea. We work down there, as
hard, perhaps, as you do here, but we have more things to work with.
Don't get the notion, little girl, that all these things which I have
told you of are magic things which surely will bring happiness! There is
no more of that, I reckon, in the bluegrass than there is here in the
mountains. Silks and satins don't make happiness, balls and garden-fetes
don't make it. A girl who's sobbing in a ball gown can be quite as
miserable as you would be, unhappy in your homespun."

She was impatient of his moralizing. "I know that," she said. "Dellaw,
don't you suppose I've got some sense? But it ain't _quite_ true,
neither. Maybe if I was going to be unhappy I'd be just as much so in a
silk dress as I would in this here cotton one that I've got on; but I
guess there's times when I'd be happier in the silk than I _would_ be in
this. My, I wisht I had one!"

He looked at her appraisin