en Conway,
born and reared under the brow of Sand Mountain, he seemed every
afternoon, when he reached the mountain peak, to linger, in a
friendly way, behind it.

And a bold warrior-looking crest it was, helmeted with a stratum of
sand-stone, jutting out in visor-shaped fullness about his head, and
feathery above with scrub-oak and cedar.

Perhaps it had been a fancy which lingered from childhood; but from
the time when Mammy Maria had first told her that the sun went to bed
in the valley beyond the mountain until now,--her eighteenth
year,--Helen still loved to think it was true, and that behind the
face of Sunset Rock he still lingered to undress; and, lingering, it
made for her the sweetest and most romantic period of the day.

True to her antebellum ideas, Mammy Maria dressed her two girls every
afternoon before dinner. It is also true that she cooked the dinner
herself and made their dresses with her own fingers, and that of late
years, in the poverty of her drunken master, she had little to dress
them with and less to cook.

But the resources of the old woman seemed wonderful--to the people
round about,--for never were two girls more gorgeously gowned than
Helen and Lily. It was humorous, it was pathetic--the way it was
done.

From old bureau drawers and cedar chests, stored away in the attic
and unused rooms of Millwood, where she herself had carefully put
them in days long gone--days of plenty and thrift--she brought forth
rich gowns of another age, and made them over for Helen and Lily.

"Now, this gown was Miss Clara's," she would say as she took out a
bundle of satin and old lace. She looked at it fondly--often with
tears in her honest black eyes. "Lor', how well I disremember the
night she fust wore it--the night of the ball we give to Jineral
Jackson when he first come to see old Marster. This flowered silk
with pol'naize she wore at the Gov'nor's ball and the black velvet
with cut steel I've seed her wearin' at many an' many a dinner here
in this very house."

And so the old woman would go over all her treasures. Then, in a few
days the gossipy and astounded neighbors would behold Helen and Lily,
dressed, each, in a gown of white brocaded satin, with a dinner gown
of black velvet, and for Sunday, old point lace, with petticoats of
finest hand-made Irish linen and silk stockings--all modernized with
matchless deft and skill.

"I guess my gals will shine as long as the old chist lasts," she
woul