ireplace and a great
fire that gave Chad a pang of homesickness at once. Chad was not
accustomed to taking off his hat when he entered a house in the
mountains, but he saw the Major take off his, and he dropped his own
cap quickly. The Major sank into a chair.

"Here we are, little man," he said, kindly.

Chad sat down and looked at the books, and the portraits and prints,
and the big mirrors and the carpets on the floor, none of which he had
ever seen before, and he wondered at it all and what it all might mean.
A few minutes later, a tall lady in black, with a curl down each side
of her pale face, came in. Like old Tom, the driver, the Major, too,
had been wondering what his sister, Miss Lucy, would think of his
bringing so strange a waif home, and now, with sudden humor, he saw
himself fortified.

"Sister," he said, solemnly, "here's a little kinsman of yours. He's a
great-great-grandson of your great-great-uncle--Chadwick Buford. That's
his name. What kin does that make us?"

"Hush, brother," said Miss Lucy, for she saw the boy reddening with
embarrassment and she went across and shook hands with him, taking in
with a glance his coarse strange clothes and his soiled hands and face
and his tangled hair, but pleased at once with his shyness and his dark
eyes. She was really never surprised at any caprice of her brother, and
she did not show much interest when the Major went on to tell where he
had found the lad--for she would have thought it quite possible that he
might have taken the boy out of a circus. As for Chad, he was in awe of
her at once--which the Major noticed with an inward chuckle, for the
boy had shown no awe of him. Chad could hardly eat for shyness at
supper and because everything was so strange and beautiful, and he
scarcely opened his lips when they sat around the great fire, until
Miss Lucy was gone to bed. Then he told the Major all about himself and
old Nathan and the Turners and the school-master, and how he hoped to
come back to the Bluegrass, and go to that big college himself, and he
amazed the Major when, glancing at the books, he spelled out the titles
of two of Scott's novels, "The Talisman" and "Ivanhoe," and told how
the school-master had read them to him. And the Major, who had a
passion for Sir Walter, tested Chad's knowledge, and he could mention
hardly a character or a scene in the two books that did not draw an
excited response from the boy.

"Wouldn't you like to stay here in