ich I
could see was bowed in prayer. In a moment I knew from their Flemish
patois, which I had heard so often out in the fields of beautiful
Belgium during that happy month just before the war, that they were
refugees, and my heart went out in a rush to them as I went in a rush to
Sam and grasped his arm.

"Oh, what is it, Sam, and what do they want?" I asked.

"They are emigrants from Belgium. The Commissioner has had me appointed
to settle them in the Harpeth Valley on lands near my own, for which he
has options. I came on in response to his telegram to meet them
to-morrow, but they were landed here on the dock at one o'clock in the
night, because of a fire on the steamer. I came right down from the
theater, but they are frightened and the women have lost all confidence
in everything. They don't seem to want to go with me to the car that we
have ready to take them to Tennessee. I can't understand them, nor they
me, and I sent for you. You're a woman, Betty. See what you can do to
comfort and hearten them and make them ready to go with me when the
train leaves in less than two hours."

Oh, I know I am young and have been sheltered, and don't know what it is
to be shot at and killed, and have my children torn from my arms and to
be hungry and cold. But women do understand other suffering women, and
when I stretched out my hands to the fierce woman with her starving
child at her breast, I knew what to falter out in a mixture of her own
patois and mine.

"_Il est bon_--a good, good man. _Alle avec_--go with him," I pleaded.

"But it is a fine gentleman! No, we come to a master, to work that we do
not starve. A landowner," she said, and regarded Sam in his purple and
fine broadcloth with fierce and desperate distrust that the other women
also expressed with hissing breaths which brought surly growls of
suspicious acquiescence from the men.

"But look, look!" I exclaimed. I turned to Sam and drew one of his big,
farm-worn hands forward and held it in mine out to the fierce woman,
behind whom the others cowered. There was the broad thumb, off of which
the barrel of peas had smashed the nail. There were the deep
plow-callouses in the palms, and the plow-ropes' hard gall around the
left wrist. The fierce woman's somber eyes lighted; for the first time
she looked up past Sam's velvety white shirt-front with its pearl studs,
up into the calm eyes that were smoldering their gridiron look down at
her and the whimpering wome