pression it
wore before it had grown pinched and ascetic and insistently sorrowful;
one might guess how she had looked when Tyler Sudley first went up the
mountain "a-courtin," She sought to assume no other stand-point. Here
she was intrenched. She shook her head in negation. The affair was none
of hers. Ty Sudley could take ample care of it.

Nehemiah gave a little skip that might suggest a degree of triumph.
"Aha, not ploughin'! But _Ty_ is ploughin', I seen him in the field. An'
Lee-yander ain't ploughin'! An' how did I know? Ez I war a-ridin' along
through the woods this mornin' I kem acrost a striplin' lad a-walkin'
through the undergrowth ez onconsarned ez a killdee an' ez nimble. An'
under his chin war a fiddle, an' his head war craned down ter it." He
mimicked the attitude as he stood on the hearth. "He never looked up
wunst. Away he walked, light ez a plover, an' _a-ping, pang, ping,
pang_," in a high falsetto, "went that fiddle! I war plumb 'shamed fur
the critters in the woods ter view sech idle sinfulness, a ole _owel_,
a-blinkin' down out'n a hollow tree, kem ter see what _ping, pang, ping,
pang_ meant, an' thar war a rabbit settin' up on two legs in the bresh,
an' a few stray razor-back hawgs; I tell ye I war mortified 'fore even
sech citizens ez them, an' a lazy, impident-lookin' dog ez followed
him."

"How did ye know 'twar Lee-yander?" demanded Mrs. Sudley, recognizing
the description perfectly, but after judicial methods requiring strict
proof.

"Oh-h! by the fambly favor," protested the gaunt and hard-featured
Nehemiah, capably. "I knowed the Yerby eye."

"He hev got his mother's eyes." Mrs. Sudley had certainly changed her
stand-point with a vengeance. "He hev got his mother's _be-you-ti-ful
blue_ eyes and her curling, silken brown hair--sorter red; little Yerby
in _that_, mebbe; but sech eyes, an' sech lashes, an' sech fine curling
hair ez none o' yer fambly ever hed, or ever will."

"Mebbe so. I never seen him more'n a minit. But he might ez well hev a
_be-you-ti-ful_ curlin' nose, like the elephint in the show, for all the
use he air, or I be afeard air ever likely ter be."

*****

Tyler Sudley's face turned gray, despite his belligerent efficiencies,
when his wife, hearing the clank of the ox-yoke as it was flung down in
the shed outside, divined the home-coming of the ploughman and his team,
and slipped out to the barn with her news. She realized, with a strange
enlightenment as to her