ittle cabin. He looked into her
eyes and they were shining with tears.

"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.

"Nothing, Boy, I'm just dreaming of you!"

* * * * *

The first day of the fall in his sixth year he asked his mother to let
him go to the next corn-shucking.

"You're too little a boy."

"I can shuck corn," he stoutly argued.

"You'll be good, if I let you go?" she asked.

"What's to hurt me there?"

"Nothing, unless you let it. The men drink whiskey, the girls dance.
Sometimes there's a quarrel or fight."

"It won't hurt me ef I 'tend to my own business, will it?"

"Nothing will ever hurt you, if you'll just do that, Boy," the father
broke in.

"May I go?"

"Yes, we're invited next week to a quilting and corn-shucking. I'll go
with you."

The Boy shouted for joy and counted the days until the wonderful event.
They left home at two o'clock in the wagon. The quilting began at three,
the corn-shucking at sundown.

The house was a marvellous structure to the Boy's excited imagination.
It was the first home he had ever seen not built of logs.

"Why, Ma," he cried in open-eyed wonder, "there ain't no logs in the
house! How did they ever put it together?"

"With bricks and mortar."

The Boy couldn't keep his eyes off this building. It was a simple,
one-story square structure of four rooms and an attic, with little
dormer windows peeping from the four sides of the pointed roof.
McDonald, the thrifty Scotch-Irishman, from the old world, had built it
of bricks he had ground and burnt on his own place.

The dormer windows peeping from the roof caught the Boy's fancy.

"Do you reckon his boys sleep up there and peep out of them holes?"

The mother smiled.

"Maybe so."

"Why don't we build a house like that?" he asked at last. "Don't you
want it?"

The mother squeezed his little hand:

"When you're a man will you build your mother one?"

He looked into her eyes a moment, caught the pensive longing and
answered:

"Yes. I will."

She stooped and kissed the firm mouth and was about to lead him into the
large work-room where the women were gathering around the quilts
stretched on their frames, when a negro slave suddenly appeared to take
her horse to the stable. He was fat, jolly and coal black. His yellow
teeth gleamed in their blue gums with a jovial welcome.

The Boy stood rooted to the spot and watched until the negro
disappeared. It was the first b