and red up the
great chimney.

Old Sally no longer presided at the cookery. With a large cup of black
coffee before her, she now sat at the table eating corn-bread and bacon.
A drooping black sunbonnet on her head covered her unkempt, grizzly
hair, and a cob pipe and bag of tobacco lay at her hand. She was ready
for departure. Cassandra had returned, and her gratuitous neighborly
offices were at an end. The girl was stooping before the fire, arranging
a cake of corn-bread to cook in the ashes. A crane swung over the flames
on which a fat iron kettle was hung, and the large coffee-pot stood on
the hearth. The odor of breakfast was savory and appetizing. As David's
tall form cast a shadow across the sunlit space on the floor, the old
mother's voice called to him from the corner.

"Come right in, Doctah; take a cheer and set. Your breakfast's ready, I
reckon. How have you slept, suh?"

The girl at the fire rose and greeted him, but he missed the boy.
"Where's the little chap?" he asked.

"Cassandry sont him out to wash up. F'ust thing she do when she gets
home is to begin on Hoyle and wash him up."

"He do get that dirty, poor little son," said the girl. "It's like I
have to torment him some. Will you have breakfast now, suh? Just take
your chair to the table, and I'll fetch it directly."

"Won't I, though! What air you have up here! It makes me hungry merely
to breathe. Is it this way all the time?"

"Hit's this-a-way a good deal," said Sally, from under her sunbonnet,
"Oh, the' is days hit's some colder, like to make water freeze right
hard, but most days hit's a heap warmer than this."

"That's so," said the invalid. "I hev seen it so warm a heap o' winters
'at the trees gits fooled into thinkin' hit's spring an' blossoms all
out, an' then come along a late freez'n' spell an' gits their fruit all
killed. Hit's quare how they does do that-a-way. We-all hates it when
the days come warm in Feb'uary."

"Then you must have been glad to have snow yesterday. I was
disappointed. I was running away from that sort of thing, you know."

Thryng's breakfast was served to him as had been his supper of the
evening before, directly from the fire. As he ate he looked out upon the
usual litter of corn fodder scattered about near the house, and a few
implements of the simplest character for cultivating the small pocket of
rich soil below, but beyond this and surrounding it was a scene of the
wildest beauty. Giant forest trees