here room had been added to room in a straight line,
until it looked like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines
across at the clearing where the hardly more pretentious home of Darby
Stanley was set back amid a little orchard of ragged peach-trees, and
half hidden under a great wistaria vine. But though the two places lay
within rifle shot of each other, they were almost as completely divided
as if the big river below had rolled between them. Since the great fight
between old Darby and Cove Mills over Henry Clay, there had rarely been
an election in which some members of the two families had not had a
"clinch". They had to be thrown together sometimes "at meeting", and
their children now and then met down on the river fishing, or at "the
washing hole", as the deep place in the little stream below where the
branches ran together was called; but they held themselves as much
aloof from each other as their higher neighbors, the Hampdens and the
Douwills, did on their plantations. The children, of course, would "run
together", nor did the parents take steps to prevent them, sure that
they would, as they grew up, take their own sides as naturally as they
themselves had done in their day. Meantime "children were children", and
they need not be worried with things like grown-up folk.

When Aaron Hall died and left his little farm and all his small
belongings to educate free the children of his poor neighbors, the
farmers about availed themselves of his benefaction, and the children
for six miles around used to attend the little school which was started
in the large hewn-log school-house on the roadside known as "Hall's Free
School". Few people knew the plain, homely, hard-working man, or wholly
understood him. Some thought him stingy, some weak-minded, some only
queer, and at first his benefaction was hardly comprehended; but in time
quite a little oasis began about the little fountain, which the poor
farmer's bequest had opened under the big oaks by the wayside, and
gradually its borders extended, until finally it penetrated as far as
the district, and Cove Mills's children appeared one morning at the door
of the little school-house, and, with sheepish faces and timid voices,
informed the teacher that their father had sent them to school.

At first there was some debate over at Darby Stanley's place, whether
they should show their contempt for the new departure of the Millses, by
standing out against them, or should fo