ed away. And then followed a lecture on floriculture, agriculture,
and horticulture that I immensely enjoyed.

"Yes," assented the fledgling, with the greatest intellectual
enthusiasm, "baby beets folds up jest that way," and he illustrated
after Sam, with his grubby little paddies, "same as chickens in eggs
and--"

"Come on, Betty, let's go select the spot for the cedar-log temple for
Peter's muses," Sam interrupted as he made a lightning grab for the Byrd
and tumbled him back into the loamy earth.

I realized then that up to a quarter of five o'clock on that
twenty-first-of-April day I had been really wretchedly uneasy about
Peter in every way, that I did and did not understand since that scene
at the tea-table in the Astor when I had assumed the responsibility of
him. But at that moment when Sam held back a tangle of blackberry-bushes
and low-sweeping dogwood boughs, and we stepped out on a moss-covered
rock-ledge that commanded a view of the Harpeth Valley, stretching away
and away in an iridescent shimmer of springiness and sunshine, it
completely vanished, for the time being, anyway.

"Oh," I said, with a great sigh of relief, "let's plant Peter here.
He--he can grow his dream in this place."

"Yes," answered Sam, quietly, "I'll log up and daub up a shack right
here, with a stone fireplace. It won't cost anything, for I'll use my
own logs and pick up my own stones. Thank God for shoulders and arms
which can make shelter for anybody that needs it anywhere," and as he
spoke Sam looked across the valley into the blaze of the sun that was
beginning to go down behind Paradise Ridge, with that earth-smolder I
was beginning to recognize. I knew that David and Moses and Christ had
all looked down across new life from a hillside, and Sam seemed almost
transfigured to me. And I had a--a vision. I saw that Sam was to be one
of a gigantic new kind of men to whom all who were ahungered and athirst
would come to be cared for. I had brought Peter to him first, and I
knew--I felt that others--that--

"Sam," I said, as I reached out and laid a timid hand, for the first
time stained with earth labor, on the blue sleeve of his overalls,
"don't ever leave Peter and me anywhere you are not, will you?"

"I'm always here for you both when you need me, Betty. Just call," he
answered. "And now you hustle home to Mother Hayes or she won't let me
have you at six and a quarter cents any more."

"Make it five, Sam. I feel smaller now