urneying for anyone to keep
bright and "chirk up" in.

Not that anyone in particular expected "them poor Hayneses" to keep
bright or "chirk up." As far back as he could remember, Luke had
realized that the hand of God was laid on his family. Dragging his bad
leg up the hill pastures after the cow, day in and day out, he had
evolved a sort of patient philosophy about it. It was just inevitable,
like a lot of things known in that rock-ribbed and fatalistic region--as
immutably decreed by heaven as foreordination and the damnation of
unbaptized babes. The Hayneses had just "got it hard."

Yet there were times, now he was come to a gangling fourteen, when
Luke's philosophy threatened to fail him. It wasn't fair--so it wasn't!
They weren't bad folks; they'd done nothing wicked. His mother worked
like a dog--"no fair for her," any way you looked at it. There were
times when the boy drank in bitterly every detail of the miserable place
he called home and knew the depths of an utter despair.

If there was only some way to better it all! But there was no chance.
His father had been a failure at everything he touched in early life,
and now he was a hopeless invalid. Tom was an idiot--or almost--and
himself a cripple. And Nat! Well, Nat "wa'n't willin'"--not that one
should blame him. Times like these, a lump like a roc's egg would rise
in the boy's throat. He had to spit--and spit hard--to conquer it.

"If we hain't the gosh-awfulest lot!" he would gulp.

To-day, as he came up the lane, June was in the land. She'd done her
best to be kind to the farm. All the old heterogeneous rosebushes in the
wood-yard and front "lawn" were pied with fragrant bloom. Usually Luke
would have lingered to sniff it all, but he saw only one thing now with
a sudden skipping at his heart--an automobile standing beside the front
porch.

It was not the type of car to cause cardiac disturbance in a
connoisseur. It was, in fact, of an early vintage, high-set, chunky,
brassily aesthetic, and given to asthmatic choking on occasion; but Luke
did not know this. He knew only that it spelled luxury beyond all
dreams. It belonged, in short, to his Uncle Clem Cheesman, the rich
butcher who lived in the village twelve miles away; and its presence
here signaled the fact that Uncle Clem and Aunt Mollie had come to pay
one of their detestable quarterly visits to their poor relations. They
had come while he was out, and Maw was in there now, bearing it all
alone