r her guessing how keenly she was needed; but since she
never explained, it began to be noised abroad that some wandering
peddler told her. That accounted for everything and Mary had no time for
talk. She was too busy, watching with the sick, and going about from
house to house, cooking delicate gruels and broiling chicken for those
who were getting well. It is said that she even did the barn work, and
milked the cows, during that tragic time. We were not surprised. Mary
was a great worker, and she was fond of "creatur's."

Whether she came to care for these stolid people on the height, or
whether the vision counseled her, Mary gave up her house in the village,
and bought a little old dwelling under an overhanging hillside, at Horn
o' the Moon. It was a nest built into the rock, its back sitting snugly
there. The dark came down upon it quickly. In winter, the sun was gone
from the little parlor as early as three o'clock; but Mary did not mind.
That house was her temporary shell; she only slept in it in the
intervals of hurrying away, with blessed feet, to tend the sick, and
hold the dying in untiring arms. I shall never forget how, one morning,
I saw her come out of the door, and stand silent, looking toward the
rosy east. There was the dawn, and there was she, its priestess, while
all around her slept. I should not have been surprised had her lips,
parted already in a mysterious smile, opened still further in a
prophetic chanting to the sun. But Mary saw me, and the alert, answering
look of one who is a messenger flashed swiftly over her face. She
advanced like the leader of a triumphal procession.

"Anybody want me?" she called. "I'll get my bunnit."

It was when she was twenty, and not more than settled in the little
house at Horn o' the Moon, that her story came to her. The Veaseys were
her neighbors, perhaps five doors away; and one summer morning, Johnnie
Veasey came home from sea. He brought no money, no coral from foreign
parts, nor news of grapes in Eshcol. He simply came empty-handed, as he
always did, bearing only, to vouch for his wanderings, a tanned face,
and the bright, red-brown eyes that had surely looked on things we never
saw. Adam Veasey, his brother, had been paralyzed for years. He sat all
day in the chimney corner, looking at his shaking hands, and telling how
wide a swathe he could cut before he was afflicted. Mattie, Adam's wife,
had long dealt with the problem of an unsupported existence. She