Highland Annals: Ii. Coretta and Autumn

I

BY pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how long I ‘stayed in’; and Coretta’s opinions always echoed the hearth voice of the clan.

But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them paling off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was ’bad off.’ Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta wanted to borrow such or such an article for breakfast. It was always something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a broken day.

For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her borrowing the day before. ‘Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me my mornings.’

She would promise; then it would happen again — the violent waking, with its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me.

‘But I did n’t know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an’ we could n’t eat biscuits ’thout salt in ’em.’

Or, ‘That man come after supper to see about sellin’ the cow, an’ we talked so late I clean forgot we did n’t have a speck o’ coffee for breakfast.’

Or, ‘ I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an’ there was the box plumb empty.’

Or, ‘Uncle Rann got in last night. We did n’t have a dust o’ flour, an’ I could n’t set him down to pone-bread an’ him come all the way from Madison to see us.’

Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight exasperation over my failure to get her point of view.

‘But Sam had to git to the ploughin’ early, an’ you only had to jest set an’ write! ’

That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress. It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or break into a mosaic legend of itself; but it never did. One day, looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog’s feet newly scalded. A sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning. A tub in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness, that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden interest in the baby’s attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from her continent of discovery, the ashpan. Coretta snatched the baby and began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are unknown.

‘If I could skip a year ’thout a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with my work,’ she said.

But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God.

Her own mind was making occult connections. ‘Did you see the sign in the elements last night, Mis’ Dolly?’

I had not seen.

‘ It was jest after the rain stopped, an’ it was awful. There was a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin’ through it, an’ they ’most made letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was first wrote in, if we only had the preacher here to tell us. Nothin’ ’s goin’ to keep me from meetin’ next Sunday. I want to know if he read it an’ what it said. It may have been a warnin’ to them people to stop fightin’ us; but I reckon we’d all better be a little more keerful about doin’ the Lord’s will.’

I decided to defer any unorthodox suggestions, and divagated with, ‘ What ’s the matter with Irma’s nose?’

‘She fell out o’ bed an’ nearly broke it. I had a time stoppin’ the blood. I was so scared at first I could n’t remember the verse in the Bible that stops it right off, an’ I run aroun’ tryin’ everything else first. Then I got the verse right, an’ her nose never bled another drop.’

‘What verse is that, Coretta?’

‘The sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. Irmie never fell out of bed ’fore this, an’ it was time she did. I was right glad of it after I remembered the verse and got the blood stopped.’

‘Why glad, Coretta?’

‘You can’t raise a child that never falls out o’ bed. They die shore. Did n’t you know that, Mis’ Dolly?’

Her face was an eager flower, but what I saw was a glimpse of mediæval gates opening on time’s mossy twilights. Was it possible to pass through with Coretta, and look at the world wfith the psychology of a vanished age? Hitherto she had turned to me for scant crumbs of wisdom. Now she was a-quiver with the reversal of our rôles.

‘I’ve been afraid to tell you about such things,’ she said. ‘Some people jest laugh at ’em. I been so sorry for you sometimes, doin’ things I knew were bad, an’ I dasen’t tell you.’

‘What things, dear?’

‘Oh, like sowin’ that sage in the garden. You shore have trouble if you sow sage. You have to get the bunches an’ set ’em out, or else get some strange woman ’at’s passin’ to sow it for you.'

‘But is n’t that unfair to her?’

‘No; she loses the trouble as soon as she crosses water. She’d only have to cross the branch by the spring an’ it ’ud be gone.’

That was the beginning of my subversion, which was soon alarmingly complete. If I had given Coretta crumbs, she now spread me a banquet. Her store of folk-wisdom fell upon me in showers that sometimes took my breath. Many of her rituals were too complex for memory here to set down, but she had scores of briefer ones, such as her cure for a dog’s tendency to vagabondage. With an auger greased with ’coonoil made from a ’coon the dog had caught, you bore a hole in the gate-post. Then cut off a bit of the dog’s tail and fasten it in the hole; but do not let him see you. If he runs away after that, you can be sure he was peekin’ from somewheres.

She invited me to be present when gran pap cured his mule of the swinney. Part one: we poured cold water on the mule’s shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint-rock until it smoked. Part two: carefully directed by Coretta, we laid the rock back where we had found it, same side up, ‘an’ pine-blank the same way.’ And we did indeed cure the mule.

But her remedy for fever was perhaps the gem of her store. You take fodder that has never been wet, grasp all you can in your hand, cut it squarely off above your hand, and squarely off below. Of the remainder left in yourgrasp make a tea. This tea is an unfailing cure for any kind of fever.

‘Why didn’t you make it for Sam last year, Coretta?’ I asked.

‘We didn’t have any fodder that had n’t been rained on. That’s the trouble with that cure. You can’t git fodder that has n’t been wet. Every year I say I’ll cure a bit in the dry, but I always forgit about it till it’s too late.’

She was as learned in signs as in cures. ‘There,’ she might say, ‘it’s goin’ to rain, an’ I’d laid out to wash to-morrow! ’

‘But the sky is clear, and there ’s no wind from the west.’

‘Did n’t you hear that rooster crow when he was gettin’ up into the cedar? If a rooster crows as he goes to his tree, his head ’ll be wet ’fore he comes down. But maybe,’ she reflected, casting no doubt on the oracle, ‘it’ll clear by sunup, an’ I can wash anyhow.’

Her world of signs and portents and conjurations lay about her as familiar as her children’s faces, or the grass before her door. It touched her at every point and turn of her daily life. And then one day I impulsively clashed through it and shook its foundations. I was passing Sam’s cabin, when I saw, grouped at the roadside spring, Coretta, the children, and a young man who was holding the baby and lifting his shoe — yes, lifting his shoe to the baby’s mouth!

‘Wait!’ I cried, with a suddenness that made the strange young man drop the shoe, though luckily he retained the baby.

Coretta began to explain. ‘The baby ’s got the thrash, an’ I ain’t got time to take her all the way to old Uncle Dean Larky’s for him to blow in her mouth.’

‘Blow in her mouth? That toothless old man!’

‘He’s got the power in his breath. Jest blows in her mouth an’ says the three highest words in the Bible. But I could n’t go so fur, an’ I ’ve been watchin’ for Zeb Austin to pass. He’s blackeyed, you know.’

I saw that the young man was blackeyed — at that moment rather flashingly, hostilely black-eyed. Whether a magician benignly engaged, or a fool caught in his act, the interruption called for resentment.

Coretta was still explaining. ‘If a baby’s got the thrash, an’ a black-eyed male person gives her a drink out of his right shoe, it’ll cure the worst case as ever was.’

‘Give me the baby,’ said I.

She was handed to me. I walked off, up the hill, where I could get a view of the broad valley and a sky clear with sunlight — as clear and welcome as the dry light of science. Coretta followed.

‘What’s the matter, Mis’ Dolly?’

‘Lies!’

‘Don’t you believe it’ll cure her?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you believe — any o’ them things?’

‘No.’

‘ Give me my baby! ’

The arrogant world of mind, for all its embattled glitter, surrendered to the physical fact of motherhood. I gave her the baby.

It was two weeks before I saw Coretta. The day was warm; I had been circling about a hot stove for hours, canning blueberries, and had thrown off my slippers for stockinged comfort. Coretta came into the yard just as I stepped to the door.

‘Don’t move,’she called, beginning to run. ‘Don’t move till I git your shoes! Every step you take is a step in trouble.’

Aghast, I obeyed her. When the shoes were brought, and on my feet, she looked up triumphantly. ‘I knew you was n’t so unbelievin’ as you let on.’

And my surprised and chastened soul agreed.

II

One summer, — it was a war summer,— I thought by personal effort and example to swell the national harvest. I had suggested, advised, and implored. Now I would dig and plant and water, hoping that a beneficent contagion would transform my land from a wasteful reproach to a prolific blessing. My ambitious programme was interrupted midway by one of those calls that came in hurried battalions to those ‘left behind,’ and I had been a forgetful time away, when I realized, with aching insurrection, that Autumn must be in the Unakas. In my weariness I thought of her as a giant matron, seated amid her peaks, with hair flowing like rivers of copper, and arms stretched out with a vast tenderness to take even me to her bosom. And I fled toward her, my heart and mind exchanging jumbled murmurs of extenuation. Did not the country need all its farmers?

Coretta and her dancing youngsters did not meet me as usual under the white oak half-way up the mountain. I asked Serena, who joined me there, concerning the omission, and from her discreet evasion I surmised that a disclosure awaited me in Coretta’s trepidant breast. It was several days in fledging. I ignored the mystery, and plunged into the ardors of conservation. It became quickly evident that my example was not to be the little candle that far illumes a wayward world. Coretta did not come near me; and one morning, when I saw Serena approaching, her radiance visible a hundred yards away, I knew that only one thing could give such a tinge of glory to her countenance. She was coming to announce one of her sudden journeys. Yes, Len had agreed for her to visit a sister who lived sixty miles distant.

‘With everything to do?’ I cried.

‘ I can work harder after I come back. A jaunt always helps me.’

That was true. She would look younger, by ten years, on her return.

‘Can Len afford it now, Serena?’

‘I told him I’d git the money from you, an’ work it out when I got back.

I can put in several days ’fore fodderpullin’. I reckon you ’ll be wantin’ some help by that time,’ she added, with a glance at the beans and tomatoes in piles on the kitchen porch. By that time, indeed!

Her radiance began to fade. Was it possible I could hestitate?

‘I told Len you’d never refused me yit.'

With the money happily clutched, she turned a shining back upon me.

I started meekly to Coretta’s. But so many evidences of neglect seen on the way brought me to her in remonstrative mood.

She was very busy sewing. The children were to have new dresses. And in harvest-time!

’I thought I should find you canning, Coretta. ’

‘I ain’t got no heart this year,’ she said.

I tried to recall some of the mottoes of the period. Every mouthful we save, and so forth. ‘And your brother is over there, you know.’

She dropped her head.

‘ I see your beans are not picked yet.’

‘I jest ain’t got no heart.’

‘Is that why you did n’t keep the weeds out of my garden?’

‘Yes, Mis’ Dolly.’

‘But I sent you the hat.’

Her head went lower. I had, while away, spent half of a much-needed day in search of a hat that would withstand mountain wear and weather, yet be pretty enough for Coretta’s taste.

‘And you let the pigs get to my potato patch.'

She turned to the machine. Well, it was my machine. I looked at the gay pieces of gingham scattered about and resolved to be drastic.

‘I’m going to have the machine brought home, Coretta. You won’t have any time for sewing until you get your fruit and vegetables put up.’

She was dismayed, ‘Oh, I’ll never git ready!’

‘Ready for what?’

’To go to the mills.’

‘The mills!’

‘We’re all goin’ to Georgia. Sam can git three dollars a day there. Katy can keep house an’ tend to the young uns, an’ I’m goin’ to work, too. We can make ’tween five and six dollars a day. An’ I’ve got to have the machine. How ’ll I ever git their clo’es made?’

She ran on, but I shrank aside, looking about me and counting the curly heads. Our supreme judiciary had that year annulled the law of the people for the rescue of the child in the mills.

‘Coretta, you can’t take these babies — ’

‘Oh, I knew you’d talk that way, but please don’t, for we’ve got to go. The tickets have come, an’ we have to use ’em inside o’ two weeks. I’m jest worn out workin’ on the farm like a man, an’ in the house, too. We’ll never git a start here.’

I had no argument against the truth. Once I had thought of making Sam the legal owner of that part of the farm he was supposed to till, and had consulted the village wise man about it.

‘Let me see,’ he said: ‘Sam gets the full product of his labor now, don’t he? ’

‘Oh, you read the book?’

‘Sure, I did! And you keep the place up? Pay for fencin’, and the like?’

I admitted it.

‘And the taxes?’

‘Of course.’

‘And he can’t make ends meet?’

‘No.’

‘ Well, if I was Sam, I’d injunct aginst any change that ’ud saddle me with taxes and improvements.’

So I had made no change. And I had no answer for Coretta. She was still talking.

‘They’ll give us a good house at the mill, an’ furnish it too.’

‘If you pay three times over in instalments.’

‘When I git enough for my house, I mean to move back.’

‘You’ll never get it paid for, and if you leave they’ll sell it to somebody else. They count on getting pay from three families for every set of furniture they put out.’

‘You need n’t talk like that, Mis’ Dolly,’ she said, with her face all protest. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Very well.’ I rose, and started out. Spying the hat that had cost me so much thought, I said, ‘You did n’t like the hat?’

Her face became an eager pink with satisfaction.

‘Shore I liked it! Everybody says it jest suits me. I want everything like that hat!'

So my success had defeated me. She had been seduced by perfection. And I reflected, as I walked home, that even if one brought up in a morass, it was something to follow the twinkling of a very little star. I had seen in Coretta the flutter of a potentiality that would one day redeem life from squalor and give the planet an unquenchable glow.

The first shock over, I could not stifle the thought that the loss of Sam would be an excellent thing for me. I could replace him with a man whose ideas of farming were not inherited from his great-grandfather: some one who would not make me poorer every year, and keep my wits exercised on the problem of his family’s support. And then, like the breaking of a soft light, the thought stole upon me that I need never again be roused from morning sleep to supply Coretta’s breakfast omissions. Let her go her way. I would not expostulate; I would not persuade; I would not even be sad. My pillow should be mine henceforth.

But I took care to avoid the children. This seemed necessary to the anticipated enjoyment of that pillow. I kept away from Coretta’s cabin, and when I saw bobbing curls nearing mine through the bushes, I had sudden errands elsewhere.

I had begun with the beans, fearing an early frost, and remembering the many summer dawns I had preciously invested in keeping the rows clean. They hung in green multiplicity, in spite of the choking weeds that had reared their heads high, unmolested by Coretta’s hoe. In fact, there was a disconcerting abundance all about me. Having set out to be an example of thrift, opportunity hung from every bush.

In this hand-to-hand engagement, I lost sight of general aims and purposes. The fourteen points were laid by for later digestion. My New York daily, ordered for filing through a momentous period, served excellently for wrapping winter stores. I did not quite cease to look at the labor horizon for epochal phenomena; but one day, after talking with a farmer on the relative value of two varieties of sweet potatoes, the Texas White and Early Beauty, I found this penciled among my farm-notes: ‘The Bisbee deportation is mealy for fall use, but the Soviets are the best winter keepers.’ Then I began to have misgivings; but I crushed the seditious rumbling and kept on the path indicated by the Department.

Serena returned, but went at once, as I had known she must, to the fodderpulling, and I had only an occasional friendly hand lent me for help. I had moved my typewriter into the kitchen, thinking that odd moments might go to the making of a masterpiece; but if genius gave a surviving flutter, its tremolo was drowned by the drums and tabors of conservation pomp. To Nature’s lender surprises I became callous; and for her beauty that challenged obviously, I could say with Coretta that I had no heart.

Coretta, who knew of old that I rather liked sunsets, coming one day to borrow my last machine-needle, called my attention to an aggressively colored sky by saying it was like a pile of ‘ greenlins an’ ’maters.’ (Greenlands and tomatoes — yes.) I assented so readily that Coretta flushed with the success of her venture in poetics.

When she was gone, I reflectively picked a letter from my batch of halfread mail. It began: ‘Your last filled me with a veritable nostalgia for your mountain. The odor of ripened grains and fruits and new-cut wood overcomes me whenever I think of it. I see great white clouds rearing their domes against a deep, blue sky; and at my feet gentians star my way to you.'

I dropped the letter. Where was Autumn? How had I lost her? Like a spear-thrust the question kept recurring until the next day, when Aunt Janey Stiles came.

III

Aunt Janey lived over the mountain on Juniper Creek, three miles west of me, and carried all her supplies on her shoulder from the village two miles to the east. On her way out she would take eggs, butter, chickens, beans, — anything exchangeable at the village store, — and on her way in would carry flour, coffee, sugar, salt, soda, and lard. She had done this for forty years, and looked wiry and tenacious enough to do it for forty more. She sometimes paused for half a day, and once spent the night with me; but, unlike the neighborly highlanders, would never turn a hand to help me. She watched me work as she might have attended a play, and this did not make for the smoothness of my operations; but I was always glad to see Aunt Janey. Her attainments did not include a knowledge of the alphabet, but her mind sometimes revealed a glitter that made me think her brown, withered body held an old-world spirit, — Greek, perhaps,— a Periclesian favorite.

‘I was n’t meanin’ to stop,’ she said, as her sack slid from her shoulders; ‘ but seein’ the big kittle smokin’ in the yard, I ’lowed you’s makin’ apple-butter, an’ I like to watch it poppin’. Don’t you quit stirrin’. I’ll fetch me a cheer from the kitchen. The sun’s as soft as a new blanket to-day.’

She returned with the chair, and continued, ‘You’ve got to watch applebutter closer’n a creepin’ baby if anybody’s goin’ to eat it.’

Did she know that I had burned up one kettleful? Though I had tried to remove all trace of it, there might be a treacherous odor in the air.

‘That’s so, Aunt Janey,’ I said; ‘but I’m going to take time to empty this anyway.’ And I took up a tub of appleparings. I could utilize those parings in three ways, and for that triple reason I wished them to disappear quickly.

‘They ’re tellin’ all around that you ’re powerful agin wastin’ stuff,’ said Aunt Janey when I had returned, in a tone so intentionally colorless that I became suspicious and defensive.

‘I am. And I could have carried those parings to Sam’s hogs; but Sam would be lazier to-morrow than he is today. And I could have made vinegar out of them; but I’d have had to take Len from the field to bring back the barrel that Serena borrowed last year. And I could make jelly. But with all those fine jelly apples lying around in bushels on the ground, why should I save parings?’

‘You forgot beer,’ said Aunt Janey.

‘Beer?’ I faltered.

I had elderberry wine, and blackberry cordial, and peaches brandied in brown sugar as dietetic allurements — but beer!

‘Best beer you ever drunk by a hickory fire in the dead o’ Jinniwary. Stir, gal, stir!’

I stirred. ‘But I don’t drink beer,’ said I brightening, ‘and nobody ought to now.’

‘You don’t eat pickle either — tomato-pickle, cabbage-pickle, beet-pickle, pickylilly, onion-pickle, pickle everything. An’ you kain’t eat much p’sarves, but I noticed you had ’most all sorts when I looked over your stock.’

‘But the plain fruits and vegetables — everybody likes them’

‘You ’re a leetle short on some of ’em, ain’t you? Had a nice lot o’ beans to spile on you, did n’t you?’

How had she heard? I had buried the contents of twelve large jars in the garden after dark, hoping that my influence as a conserver would not be diminished. How did she know? I looked up from my stirring and met a glance of Aspasian dubiety. She did n’t know! She had been guessing. But my start had betrayed me. As soon as I was caught, she became sincerely consoling.

‘Tut, gal, beans are always hard for a beginner. It was that run you took off at night, I reckon. I knowed when I passed you’d be in the night with it; an’ I knowed they’d spile, you was so flustered. It takes a ca’m sperret to put up beans to stay. Leather breeches is safer.'

She took up her sack.

‘There’s a powerful lot o’ wild grapes this year.'

‘Is there?’ I said, so dispiritedly that she put down her sack.

‘Biggest and juiciest I ever seen. A body ought to put up a lot o’ grapes. They’re so tonicky. An’ they make the nicest jelly there is for the sick. Tarty like. Apple jelly’s too tame for a stomach ’at’s off a bit. Not speakin’ agin yourn, seein’ you got such a power of it. An’ namin’ the sick, ain’t you never thought o’ puttin’ up mullin? There’s enough for Europe an’ Ameriky too in your new ground, an’ it’ll shore cure that winter cough people has — cure it right now. If you don’t mean to break off at all, if you ain’t goin’ to stop any-wheres, if I’s you I’d fix up some good yarb medicines. You can send them to the soldiers. There’s shumake for a swelled throat, an’ boneset for the ager, an’ pokeweed for rheumatiz,an’spignet for consumption, an’ a lot more I’ll show you if you go home with me some time. Things to he’p folks, ’stead of a lot of stuff to chuck up the stomach an’ make ’em sicker. S’pose you go home with me right now.’

‘ With so much to do?’ I said. ‘ Oh, I could n’t!’

‘There’ll always be something to do, gal. If we lived till we finished up, the world ud be full of Methuselys, an’ no room for the young folks. Nobody finishes. They got to break off.'

She shouldered her sack and started, pausing a rod away for one more barb.

‘You goin’ to gether yer sunflower seed? I’ve hearn they eat ’em in Rooshia.’

Aunt Janey was right: I had the uncomfortable habit of hanging on for a finish that the gods would never uncover. And what could I do about it? There was one answer — Serena. She could break off without a qualm. She could sing the doxology while doing it, and give the Amen a sprightly reverberation.

Without daring to pause, I started off, stepping as briskly as Aunt Janey, but in the opposite direction. I would get Serena to come and clear away every sign of conservation, and I would walk on the mountains while she was doing it. If only I might find her in the disengaged period she would be sure to observe between fodder-pulling and sorghum-making!

As I neared Len’s cabin the odor of boiling syrup told me I was too late. I arrived and looked drearily on the scene. A shouting boy was busily driving the oxen that turned the cane-mill, which was spouting with juice. More juice foamed in the boiler on the furnace. Len, his seven children, three neighbors, and their children, were officiating in various or the same parts. Serena was skimming the boiling syrup. All the country round acknowledged her as the queen of ‘ lassy-makers.’ She turned a heated face to me just long enough to say with the most cheerful of smiles, ‘They don’t give me time to make my beds.’

I was turning away, when Len stopped me.

‘We’ve taken off one biler, an’ I put a few ’lasses for you in that jug. Reenie, git the jug!’

‘I don’t want them,’ I said, near to tears, and trapped in the vernacular.

Len was puzzled.

‘But you’re welcome to the ’lasses. I’ll bring ’em up to you.’

‘Not a spoonful, thank you, Len,’ I called, already vanishing and hastening my steps unconsciously until I found myself running—running up hill. I did not turn on the trail toward home, but went out to Three Pine Point, where one could see the river miles away, smooth, effortless, winding to some hidden land, safe and far from the malefic spirit of industry. I dropped to the brown pine-needles. Quickly the woods set their magical currents flowing, and that sensation as of smiling veins crept over me.

Then I saw Nellie Ludd, or part of her. One could get only partial glimpses of Nellie in the woods — an upreaching arm, a strip of skirt, the sheen of her head. No, she was not golden-haired, or green-kirtled, and she did not lead the fancy back to Tempe and the vales of Arcady. Her dress was dingy brown in hue, and of cloth woven on her mother’s loom, but fashioned by herself as fittingly to her grace as fur to the marten or feathers to the swallow. Her eyes, if ever you met them, you would find to be honey-brown, like the first falling leaves. Her hair was the color of darkly shining smoke, and seemingly as loath to stay put. And the world she led the fancy to was a world which none of us have seen, but to which all secretly intend to go; a world whose picture every man holds in his heart, but will not look at in the light lest his neighbor come upon him suddenly. For, though we may have learned to love our neighbor as ourself, we have not yet learned to trust him.

It was a gracious chance that brought me to the Point just as Nellie was leaving it. ‘Breaking off’ was no longer difficult. That puttering kettle — how remote and absurd it seemed!

Descending late in the afternoon, my hills seemed to shine upon me, reflecting happy restoration. I passed by the pasture ridge where the silence was tapped by the falling chestnuts, and felt no impulse to defeat the squirrels and gophers of their prize. A bellwood crowned with purple bushels of grapes stirred no acquisitive instinct. I went calmly through the orchard, picking my way over the fallen fruit that no hand would rescue from decay; looked unwistfully at the pumpkins, cushaws, and ‘candyroasters’ that would feed nothing but the frost; and from my cabin step smiled at the flaming wing of a young maple that was like a vivid aspiration airily detaching itself from the clutch of utility and the lures of bounty.

When I went in, Serena herself could not have cast a more contented eye about my kitchen, turbulent with unfinished tasks. The autumnal spirit had effectually bathed my lacerations. The box on which conveniently rested my little typewriter was invitingly near. I sank, a willing non-resistant, into a chair, and my hands mechanically sought the keys of the machine. For a few minutes I seemed to be having a pleasant time, with consciousness unaroused to the issue. Then I took out the sheet and read, —

‘This is how they feel,’ thought I, as I drowned in placidity without a bubble struggling overhead. ‘This is why protracted meetings are held in autumn. Ah, I will call my poem “The Season of Piety.” ’

I began to feel like the good wife of a deacon. Nay, I was the deacon himself, and blushed in his elderly trousers.

With her usual ghostly suddenness, Katy appeared.

‘Mommy’s got the milkweed in her breast agin, an’ the baby’s all broke out; she’s afraid it’s the measles an’ we’ll all take ’em.’

I rose. Certainly they would all take them. The season of piety was ended.

Both cases were happily light, and when Coretta looked up from her pillow and said, ‘We ain’t goin’ away. I’ve been thinkin’ what it ud be like to git sick away from home an’ everybody,’ I did not feel that a slight reproof would be cruel.

‘Stay? With nothing laid in for the winter?’

‘But you’ve put up such a lot.’

My heart, which had softened at sight of her young cheek tracked red with the whimsical fever, felt a Pharoic relapse.

‘You know, Coretta, I have had to consider other plans.’

She was terrified, but unbelieving. The heavens could not really fall.

‘ You would n’t let us stay?’

‘On one condition, perhaps.’

Her face shone with relief. She had met conditions before, and melted through them.

‘What’s that, Mis’ Dolly?’

‘You’ll never wake me up again to borrow something for breakfast?’

‘No, I shore won’t.’

‘Cross your heart?’

‘Cross my heart.’

‘Swear to God?’

‘Swear to God.’

I looked down at the lovely face, contented with the thought of being sick and at home, and my smile undid me.

‘Swear to God,’ she repeatedly feebly, ‘unless, o’course, we’re jest smack out o’ stuff.’