f what the child was till I saw
and heard her myself. She was about thirteen years of age, but very
small and fragile. She was lame, and could walk only with the aid of a
crutch. Indeed, she could but hobble painfully, a few steps at a time,
with that assistance. Her little white face was not an attractive one,
her features being sharp and pinched, and her eyes faded, dull, and
almost expressionless. Only the full, prominent, rounding brow spoke of
a mind out of the common. She was an orphan, and lived with her aunt,
Miss Jane York, in an old-fashioned farmhouse on the upper road.

Miss Jane was a good woman. She kept the child neatly clothed and
comfortably fed, but I do not think she lavished many caresses or loving
words on little Lib, it was not her way, and the girl led a lonesome,
quiet, unchildlike life. Aunt Jane tried to teach her to read and write,
but, whether from the teacher's inability to impart knowledge, or from
some strange lack in the child's odd brain, Lib never learned the
lesson. She could not read a word, she did not even know her alphabet. I
cannot explain to myself or to you the one gift which gave her her
homely village name. She told stories. I listened to many of them, and I
took down from her lips several of these. They are, as you will see if
you read them, "kind o' fables," as the country folk said. They were all
simple little tales in the dialect of the hill country in which she
lived. But each held some lesson, suggested some truth, which, strangely
enough, the child herself did not seem to see; at least, she never
admitted that she saw or intended any hidden meaning.

I often questioned her as to this after we became friends. After
listening to some tale in which I could discern just the lovely truth
which would best help some troubled soul in her audience, I have
questioned her as to its meaning. I can see now, in memory, the
short-sighted, expressionless eyes of faded blue which met mine as she
said, "Don't mean anything,--it don't. It's jest a story. Stories don't
have to mean things; they're stories, and I tells 'em." That was all she
would say, and the mystery remained. What did it mean? Whence came that
strange power of giving to the people who came to her something to help
and cheer, both help and cheer hidden in a simple little story? Was it,
as I like to think, God-given, a treasure sent from above? Or would you
rather think it an inheritance from some ancestor, a writer, a tell