d aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little
difficulty in recognizing Judith Rodney's step-mother, _nee_ Tumlin--she
who had been the heroine of the romance lately recorded.

Mrs. Rodney's interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced in
the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in
place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours
away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission,
but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her.
Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to
enunciation, she said: "Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett's gov'ment, ain't ye?"
There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of
governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging quality.

"Government?" repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the
noise and motion of the stage; "I'm afraid I hardly understand."

"Ain't you-uns goin' to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin', writin',
and about George Washington, an' how the Yankees kem along arter he was in
his grave an' fit us and broke up the kentry so we had ter leave our home
in Tennessee an' kem to this yere outdacious place, where nobody knows the
diffunce between aig-bread an' corn-dodger? I war a Miss Tumlin from
Tennessee."

The rocking-chair now began to recover its accustomed momentum. This
much-heralded educational expert was far from terrifying. Indeed, to Mrs.
Rodney's hawklike gaze, that devoured every visible item of Mary's
extremely modest travelling-dress, there was nothing so very wonderful
about "the gov'ment from the East." With a deftness compatible only with
long practice, Mrs. Rodney now put a foot on the round of an adjoining
chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable pantomime, never
once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary took the chair, and
Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush from a small, tin box in
her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to speak, and started off at a
brisk canter.

"I 'low it's mighty queer you-uns don't recognize the job you-uns kem out
yere to take, when I call it by name." From the sheltering flap of the
pink sun-bonnet she turned a pair of black eyes full of ill-concealed
suspicion. "Miz Yellett givin' herself as many airs 'bout hirin' a
gov'ment 's if she wuz goin' to Congress. Queer you don't know whether you
be one or not!" She withdrew into the sun-