es away. They are scarcely mountains--these
beautifully wooded hills in the Tennessee Valley, hooded by blue in
the day and shrouded in somber at night; but it pleases the people
who live within the sweet influence of their shadows to call them
mountains.

Jud knew where he was going, and he rode leisurely along, revolving
in his mind the plan of his campaign. He needed the recruits for the
Acme Mills, and in all his past experience as an employment agent he
had never undertaken to bring in a family where as much tact and
diplomacy was required as in this case.

It was a dilapidated gate at which he drew rein. There had once been
handsome pillars of stone and brick, but these had fallen and the
gate had been swung on a convenient locust tree that had sprung up
and grown with its usual rapidity from its sheltered nook near the
crumbling rock wall. Only one end of the gate was hung; and it lay
diagonally across the entrance of what had once been a thousand acres
of the finest farm in the Tennessee Valley.

Dismounting, Jud hitched his horse and set his gun beside the tree;
and as it was easier to climb over the broken-down fence than to lift
the gate around, he stepped over and then shuffled along in his lazy
way toward the house.

It was an old farmhouse, now devoid of paint; and the path to it had
once been a well-kept gravel walk, lined with cedars; but the
box-plants, having felt no pruning shears for years, almost filled,
with their fantastically jagged boughs, the narrow path, while the
cedars tossed about their broken and dead limbs.

The tall, square pillars in the house, from dado above to where they
rested in the brick base below, showed the naked wood, untouched so
long by paint that it had grown furzy from rain and snow, and
splintery from sun and heat. Its green shutters hung, some of them,
on one hinge; and those which could be closed, were shut up close and
sombre under the casements.

A half dozen hounds came baying and barking around him. As Jud
proceeded, others poured out from under the house. All were ribby,
and half starved.

Without a moment's hesitation they promptly covered Bonaparte, much
to the delight of that genius. Indeed, from the half-satisfied, half
malignant snarl which lit up his face as they piled rashly and
brainlessly on him, Jud took it that Bonaparte had trotted all these
miles just to breakfast on this remnant of hound on the half-shell.

In a few minutes Bonaparte's terr