their homes,
granted stores of fuel from her mines for their warming, and nourished
great white cotton patches and flocks of sheep to clothe them from
frosts and winds.

And as he spoke in a powerful voice that intoned up in the tree-tops
like a great deep bell, he turned and looked out over the valley with an
expression like what must have been on Moses's face when he saw into the
promised land.

[Illustration: "She's our mother," he said]

"She's our Mother," he said, as he flung back the long lock from across
his forehead and stretched out his strong arm and slender hand towards
the sun that was dropping fast down to the rim of Old Harpeth. "She has
bared her breasts to suckle us, covered us from sun and snow, and now
she expects something from us. If she has built us strong and ready,
then we are to answer when the world has need of us and her storehouses
and mines. We are to give out her invitations and welcome all who are
hungry and who come a-seeking. Gentlemen, her wealth and her fertility
are yours--and her beauty!"

For a long, long minute every face in the assembly was turned to the
setting sun, and a perfect glory rose from the valley and burned the
call of its grandeur into their eyes. We seemed to be looking across
fields and forests and streams to the dim purple hills that might be the
ramparts of the Holy City itself, while just below us lay the little
quiet village of the dead whose souls must just have gone before.

And after that everybody rose with one accord and began to hurry to
start out upon the long roads homeward, just as the great yellow moon
rose in the east to balance the red old sun that was sinking in the
west. Only the Magnate sat still in his place for several long minutes
looking out across to Old Harpeth, and I wondered whether he was
thinking about the Eternal City or how many rails it was going to take
to span the valley at his feet.

And I--I just stood on the edge of the bluff by myself and let my soul
lift up its wings of rejoicing that my Crag had got his beautiful desire
for apostrophizing the Mother-Valley so all the world might hear. And
then suddenly it came over me in a great warm, uplifting, awe-inspiring
rush that a woman who takes on herself voluntarily the responsibility of
marrying a poet and an orator and a mystic, who is the complete edition
of a Mossback that all those qualities imply, must square her shoulders
for a long, steady, pioneer march through a stran