thought, would
be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast
uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.

For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and
sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as
"a petty old bundle of botheration"--and storming around at the
children--all by sun-up--this was not work at all.

It was merely an appetizer.

The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than
usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their
beds--Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from
another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same
listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do
everything--learned it while working all day between the whirl of the
spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.

The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the
valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the
mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off
crowing of cocks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices
alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around
the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo--touched as it
was by the splendid flush of the East.

It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the
poverty of work, and the two--poverty and work--had already had their
effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been
in the mill long enough to be automatonized.

Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the
mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of
there.

"Wouldn't it be fine, Mattox," she cried, "if we didn't have to work
at the mill to-day an' cu'd run up on the mountain an' pick up that
star? I seed one fall onct an' I picked it up."

For a moment the little face was thoughtful--wistful--then she added:

"I wonder how it would feel to spen' the day in the woods onct.
Archie B. says it's just fine and flowers grow everywhere. Oh, jes'
to be 'quainted with one Jeree--like Archie B. is--an' have him come
to yo' winder every mornin' an' say, '_Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet!
Wake up, Pet!_' An' then hear a little 'un over in another tree say,
'_So-s-l-ee-py--So-s-l-ee-py!_'"

Her chatter ceased again. Then: "Mattox, did you ever see a rabbit? I
seen one onct, a settin' up in a fence corner an' a spittin' on his
han'