not know before,
and there I found, rocking one baby and expecting another, one of
my schoolgirls, a daughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat
worried with her new duties, but soon bristled into pride over her neat
cabin, and the tale of her thrifty husband, the horse and cow, and the
farm they were planning to buy.

My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress, and Progress,
I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still
marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six
weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty
feet, with three windows and a door that locked. Some of the window
glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully under
the house. I peeped through the window half reverently, and found things
that were more familiar. The blackboard had grown by about two feet, and
the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot now, I hear,
and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by the spring and
looked on the Old and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet--

After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double log house
on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that used to
live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness
of hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away, and while
I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial, and people
talked. I felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come to naught from such
a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy farmer in Smith
County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared for little 'Tildy
until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard life the lad had
led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was homely and crooked.
There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had definite
notions about niggers, and hired Ben a summer and would not pay him.
Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in broad daylight
went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set upon him,
the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a murder and a
lynching that day.

The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is
a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So
I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain
ma