ving me he turned back and laid his hand on my
shoulder and said, 'Alf, I've wondered many a time what in the name of
common-sense your Pa wanted with that hoss.'

"'So have I,' said I, and he went one way and me another."

Pomp, the negro porter, was entering the door, and with a laugh Cahews
turned to meet him.

CHAPTER III

The gray light of early dawn had taken on a faint tint of yellow, and
the profound stillness of the air, the vast quietude of the mountain
foliage and drooping corn-blades gave warning of the fierce heat that
was to follow.

Dixie Hart turned her head drowsily on her pillow and opened her eyes
and closed them again. "Oh, I could sleep, sleep, sleep till doomsday,"
she said to herself. "I wish I didn't have to get up. I'd like to take
one day off. I could lie here flat on my back till night. But, old girl,
you've got to be up an' doing."

She heard the clucking and scratching of her hens, the chirping of the
tiny chickens, and the lusty crowing of her roosters in their answering
calls to neighboring fowls, the neighing of her horse in the stable, the
mooing of her cow in the barn-yard.

"They are all begging me to hurry," she mused. "They don't want to
sleep; they've had their fill through the night, while I had to be up.
Well, repining don't make good dining, and here goes."

She dressed herself, went out on the little kitchen porch, bathed in
fresh, cool well-water, and, with a coarse towel which hung from a nail
on the door-jamb, she rubbed her face, arms, and neck till they glowed
like the reddening skies.

"My two women, as sound as they pretend to sleep, are crazy for their
coffee," she smiled, "but they've got to wait, like people at a circus
do, till the animals are fed. The older folks get, the earlier they go
to bed and the earlier they rise. Heaven only knows where it will end.
If mine could get their suppers early enough they would say good-night
at sundown and good-morning when it was so dark you couldn't see 'em in
their night-clothes."

"Dixie, is that you, darling?" It was Mrs. Hart's voice, and it came
from the open window of a tiny room with a sloping roof which jutted out
from the end of the kitchen.

"Yes'm. What is it, mother?"

"Nothing." A thin hand drew a white curtain aside, and a pale, wrinkled
face, surrounded by dishevelled iron-gray hair, appeared above the
window-sill. "I just wanted to know if you was up. I heard you through
the night. Your aun