that sayin'. The rocks round the creek war repeatin' it,
whenst I crossed the foot-bredge. I dun'no what the feller meant--mought
hev been crazy."

A tricksy gust stirred at the door as if a mischievous hand twitched the
latch-string, but it hung within. There was a pause. The listening
children on the hearth sighed and shifted their posture; one of the
hounds snored sonorously in the silence.

"Nuthin' crazy thar 'ceptin' you-uns!--one fool gal--that's all!" said
her grandmother, with her knitting-needles and her spectacles glittering
in the fire-light. "That is a pest camp. Ye mought hev cotch the
smallpox. I be lookin' fur ye ter break out with it any day. When the
war is over an' the men come back to the Cove, none of 'em will so much
as look at ye, with yer skin all pock-marked--fair an' fine as it is
now, like a pan of fraish milk."

"But, granny, it won't be sp'ilt! The camp war too fur off--an' thar
warn't a breath o' wind. I never went a-nigh 'em."

"I dun'no' how fur smallpox kin travel--an' it jes' mulls and mulls in
ye afore it breaks out--don't it, S'briny?"

"Don't ax me," said Mrs. Brusie, with a worried air. "I ain't no yerb
doctor, nor nurse tender, nuther. Ethelindy is beyond my understandin'."

She was beyond her own understanding, as she sat weeping slowly,
silently. The aspect of those forlorn graves, that recorded the final
ebbing of hope and life at the pest camp, had struck her recollection
with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate
outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion--they were
naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its
suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final mystery; she felt
vaguely grieved for their sake, and she gave the clay that covered them,
still crude red clods with not yet a blade of grass, the fellowship of
her tears.

A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man's disused
brain. "Tell me _one_ thing, Ethelindy," he said, lifting his bleared
eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his
stick--"tell me this--which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?"

"I'm fur the Union," said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then
wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but
small in proportion to her size. "I'm fur the Union--fust an' last an'
all the time."

The old man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast o