spectacles at the circle of faces around
the sitting-room table. The girls had volunteered to help her pick over
berries for canning the following day. It was a sacrifice to make, too,
with the midsummer evening calling to them in all its varied orchestral
tones: Katydids and peep frogs, the swish of the wind through the big
Norway pines on the terraces, and the scrape of Shad's old fiddle from the
back porch. It was Friday evening, and Mr. and Mrs. Robbins had driven
over to the Judge's to attend a community meeting, the latter being one of
Cousin Roxy's innovations in Gilead.

"Land alive," she had been wont to say. "Here we are all living on the
same hills and valleys and never meeting 'cept on Sundays when we have to,
or now and again when there happens to be a funeral. I declare if I
didn't drive about all the time behind Ella Lou, I'd never know how folks
were getting on. So every two weeks the Judge and I are going to hold an
old-time social, only we call it a community meeting so as to try to give
it the new spirit. It's just as well for us to remember that we ain't all
dead yet by a long shot, 'though I do think there's a whole lot that ain't
got any more get up and get to them than Noah's old gray mule that had to
be shoved off the Ark."

Mr. Robbins had invited the erstwhile prisoner to accompany them, but he
had decided instead to keep on his way to the old Inn on the hill above
the village, much to Jean and Helen's disappointment.

Helen had discovered that his first name was Stanley, which relieved her
mind considerably.

"If it had been Abijah or Silas, I know I could never have forgiven him
for getting in the berry patch," she said, "but there is something
promising about Stanley. Seems as if he lit like Mercury just when there
wasn't anything happening here at all."

"Wonder if I turned out that oil stove," Mrs. Gorham said thoughtfully.
"Seems like I smell something. Shad," raising her voice, "do you get up
and go out in that 'ell' room and see if I turned out that fire under the
syrup. I smell smoke."

"Oh, Lord," groaned Shad, laying aside his cherished instrument. "You
could smell ice if you half tried."

He got up lumberingly and sauntered out through the kitchen into the long
lean-to addition, that was used as a summer kitchen now, and the moment he
opened the door there poured out a thick volume of black smoke and flying
soot. The old-fashioned oil stove had a way of letting its wicks "wor