Читать книгу Vein of Iron - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 3

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I

Children were chasing an idiot boy up the village street to the churchyard.

'Run, run, oh, what fun!' sang little Ada Fincastle, as she raced with the pursuers. Flushed and breathless, panting with delight, she felt that the whole round world and the short December day were running too. The steep street and the shingled roofs of Ironside rocked upward. The wind whistled as it sped on. Dust whirled and scattered and whirled again. The sunshine was spinning. A bird and its shadow flashed over the winter fields. Clouds flew in the sky. The road beyond the church reared and plunged into the shaggy hills. The hills shook themselves like ponies and rushed headlong among the mountains. The Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies toppled over and tumbled far down into the Valley of Virginia. 'Run, run, oh, what fun to be flying!' Then suddenly the world balanced itself, revolved slowly, and settled to rest. She had stopped.

Past the old stone church, on the edge of a field, the idiot turned and spat at his tormentors. His mouth was only a crooked hole in his face; his small dull eyes squinted between inflamed eyelids. Without dropping his pail of refuse, he squawked with rage and dodged from side to side as the boys pelted his shoulders. 'Go home, Toby, go home to your mammy!' the little girls mocked, dancing about him. 'Go home to your piggie--pig--pigs!'

Across the field, beyond the last sunken mound in the churchyard, the fallow land broke and fell into Murderer's Grave, a bare ravine, once a watercourse, where the body of a hanged man had been buried nearly a hundred years before. Since that time, Ada knew, there had been no hanging at Ironside; but some people said that the lost spirit of the murderer, with a red stripe round its neck, still prowled on stormy nights outside the churchyard. In a hovel perched on the rim of the ravine Toby Waters, the idiot, lived with his mother.

'He's afraid to go home,' Willie Andrews cried. 'His mother got drunk yesterday and beat him with her hickory stick. She sold her last petticoat for moonshine to the people on Lightnin' Ridge.'

Darting into the field, he seized the idiot's cap and stuffed it with cow droppings. Willie, the children shrieked, could always think of something to do. A great sport, he was, with the funniest face and the quickest tongue in the village. 'He wants his cap,' Janet Rowan trilled in her childish falsetto. She had an innocent rosebud face, and was fond of sticking out a small rosy tongue which the Sunday school teacher had once brushed with quinine because it told fibs. 'He's crying for his dirty old cap.'

'Oh, he won't mind,' Willie retorted. 'He eats slops. I've seen him.'

'But it hurts him,' Ada Fincastle answered slowly. 'It hurts him to cry.'

Excitement had ebbed, and her voice sounded far off and troubled. She glanced uneasily from the idiot's face to the spoiled cap (such a ragged cap!) and back again to the idiot's face, which was sagging with grief. Sudden light broke within. It was just as if her heart, too, had turned over. 'I don't like to hurt things,' she said, and there was surprise in her tone.

In a flash of vision it seemed to her that she and Toby had changed places, that they were chasing her over the fields into that filthy hovel. But it wasn't the first time she had felt like this. Last summer she had seen a rabbit torn to pieces by hounds (their own young Horace, for all his noble bearing, was among them) and she had heard it cry out like a baby. She had watched its eyes throbbing with fear and pain, like small terrified hearts. Since then she had never been able to eat rabbit unless she pretended it was chicken. Aunt Abigail Geddy said chickens were not nearly so much like babies. She said chickens didn't really mind having their necks wrung if you did it the right way.

'It does hurt him, Ralph. I know it hurts him.' Her voice was firmer now, and she looked round at Ralph McBride, who was the only boy she trusted. She could not remember when her confidence in him had begun. From the time she could crawl she had tried to follow his auburn head everywhere.

'He likes it,' Ralph replied impatiently. 'If he didn't like it, he could run home.'

'But he's lost his cap. Maybe he knows his mother will whip him if he comes home without it.' Moved by a reckless impulse, she jerked off her own cap of knitted red wool and held it out to the idiot. 'You may have mine, Toby. I don't need it.'

'What bedevilment are you up to now?' a voice shouted from the churchyard, and at the first word the children scattered and fled squealing down the village street. 'I'm sometimes tempted to think,' the voice continued, 'that children are more savage than savages.'

'He won't hurt me. I shan't run,' Ada thought. It could be nobody but Mr. Black, the minister, she knew, and she knew also, though he was a man of humane instincts, that he preferred children in Sunday school.

'Can't you leave off tormenting that unfortunate?' he called again, as he opened the gate and came out into the road where she waited alone. 'Did he snatch your cap?' he asked, glancing severely at Toby.

'No, sir, he didn't snatch it. I gave it to him.'

Standing her ground, she stared up at the ungainly figure in the long black greatcoat and the scarred face under the slouch hat of black felt. His eyes were dark and piercing; his long bony nose curved in a beak; and his smooth-shaven chin was veined in splotches like spilled blackberry wine. A livid birthmark was branded on the left side of his face between nose and temple, and this, with the drooping eye above, as defiant as the eye of a caged hawk, gave him the look of a man who had fought his way through a forest fire. Only the fire seemed to be burning not without but within. He was a saint, Ada's grandmother, who ought to have known, had insisted, and because he was a saint he had been able, in spite of his disfigurement, to attach to himself, with brief intervals of widowerhood, three excellent wives.

'What will your mother say to that?' The minister's tone was stern.

'I have another, sir. Grandmother knitted two red caps for me. One for everyday, and one for Sunday.'

He smiled, and she told herself that he no longer frightened her. 'And you have a red lining to your squirrel-skin coat.'

She looked down. Yes, 'twas true, but she hadn't thought the minister would notice what she had on. Her short coat of squirrel skins stitched together in squares had been lined by Aunt Meggie with the red flannel from one of grandmother's old petticoats. Beneath the coat she wore a frock of brown and yellow sprigged calico, chosen dark to save washing. She hoped the minister couldn't see the top of her red flannel underbody, which would poke up at the neck, though it was sewed to her petticoat of the same scratchy material. Was there anything wrong, she wondered, while her anxious gaze travelled to her brown woollen stockings with yellow stripes at the top, and farther down, but not so very far, after all, to her stout leather shoes made by old Mr. Borrows, the cobbler, who still sewed so neatly that his shoes lasted for ever. They looked clumsy, she thought; but he had assured her they would wear until her feet grew too big for them.

Though she flushed when the minister glanced down at her, she was not ashamed of her appearance. She had been told, and saw no reason to doubt, that she had a perfectly good face. 'A large mouth, but perfectly good,' Aunt Meggie had said, and Ada's mother, overhearing this, had laughed and added, 'A blunt nose, but perfectly good too'. Only, it seemed, her eyes were uncertain, or, as her mother insisted, 'improbable'. She had discovered this a year before, when she was nine, and Aunt Meggie was writing a letter about the family to a relative they had never seen, a blind and crippled old lady in Scotland. 'Shall I say that Ada's eyes are dark grey or smoky blue?' Aunt Meggie had asked, turning, pen in hand, to the child's father. 'Tell her,' he had replied quickly, 'that she has eyes like the Hebrides.' When Ada had demanded eagerly, 'What are the Hebrides, father?' he had answered mysteriously, 'The Western Isles'.

She would remember this always because it had happened the day she won her gold medal for reciting the Shorter Catechism. The medal was very thin and scarcely bigger than her thumb-nail, but it was solid gold, the minister had said when he presented it. Her name was engraved on one side in letters so fine she couldn't read them, and on the other side there was the single word 'Catechism', with the year 1900 beneath. She wore the medal threaded on a shoestring round her neck, except on special occasions when mother would search in her bureau drawers until she found a bit of old ribbon.

Suddenly, when she thought he had finished, she became aware that Mr. Black was asking another question.

'Why did you give away your cap?'

'The boys spoiled Toby's. And he was crying. He was afraid his mother might whip him.'

Mr. Black frowned. He always frowned, as Ada learned afterwards, whenever he was brought face to face with the misery of the world. It was not easy, she could see, too, for him to avoid it. His sacred calling and the whole scheme of salvation depended upon misery, mother had once complained when she was having a toothache.

'Well, I shouldn't trust her if she can lay hands on him,' he said.

While he spoke he wagged his head under the slouched brim, and because she thought it more polite to assent, she wagged back at him like a solid shadow.

'How old are you, my child?' Mr. Black inquired, after a pause.

'Ten, sir. I've been going on eleven ever since last summer.'

He nodded abruptly, and then appeared, even more abruptly, to forget her. His countenance shone in the sunlight, and her own small image seemed to wink at her from its glassy surface. She saw the drift of red in her cheeks, the freckles that never faded from her nose even in winter, and her flying hair, between brown and black, cut short to her shoulders, and curving up till it was like a drake's tail, Aunt Abigail said. She couldn't see the colour of her eyes, but that might be because they had that far-away look.

A stuttering noise at her back made her wheel round, and she saw that Toby was trying to stretch her cap over his deformed head. When she looked at him, he threw the cap in the road and held out his hands, babbling 'Sugar, sugar!'

'Can you understand what this unfortunate is saying?' Mr. Black asked.

'He's begging for something sweet. His mother taught him to say "Sugar, sugar" like that whenever he meets anybody. No, I haven't anything sweet to give you, Toby,' she said severely.

'Go home!' Mr. Black commanded, with a queer distortion of his mouth, and Toby picked up the half-emptied pail of refuse and trotted obediently along the twisted path that led across the field to the hovel.

'You ought not to throw away the caps your grandmother knits for you.' The minister's voice had saddened. 'Her fingers are not so nimble as they used to be, and her bones are more brittle. But in her prime, before that attack of lumbago last winter, you couldn't have found her match anywhere. Many of our people back in the mountains owe their lives to her and to the medicine in her saddle-bag. Often on stormy nights when word came down from Thunder Mountain that somebody was near death, and the doctor was away on another case, she would pack her saddle-bag with medicine and bandages, not forgetting cloth for a winding-sheet, and start with me on horseback up Lightning or Burned Timber Ridge.'

It's all true, Ada told herself proudly, tossing back the hair from her shoulders. Everyone spoke that way of grandmother, especially her daughter-in-law, who had come from the Tidewater and had been a belle in the gay, fast set there Aunt Meggie said, until she met father when he had his first charge in Queenborough. A fine church it was, too, the largest Presbyterian congregation in that part of the country. Why had they left there, she wondered, and come back to live with grandmother in the old manse? Would that always, even when she grew up, be a mystery? From a word Aunt Meggie had let fall, she suspected that the change had had something to do with losing their church. And then, when they were all safely at Ironside and father had begun to preach in the old stone church, which his great-great-grandfather, John Fincastle, pioneer, and his flock had built with their own hands, he had lost this charge also as soon as the second volume of his book had come from the press. It was dreadful, she couldn't help thinking, though grandmother had rebuked her for the opinion, the way pastors were dismissed just as soon as they were comfortably settled. Father had been obliged to turn into a schoolmaster and fill the parlour with rows of ugly green benches. She had heard somebody say that he was allowed to teach only profane learning, and even that was on grandmother's account, because she had done so much good in her life.

'Did your father go to Doncaster, this morning?' Mr. Black's question trailed off into the sigh she had learned to expect when anyone spoke of her father.

'Yes, sir. He went with Mr. Rowan in his two-horse gig. They started before day, and he said they would be back, if nothing happened, about sundown. It's a long way.'

'Not as the crow flies. But all ways are long over bad roads.'

'He had to go about the mortgage.' A mortgage was nothing to be ashamed of if you were self-respecting. Nor, for that matter, was being poor and doing without things, so long as you saved your pride and didn't stoop to receive charity.

What troubled her was not the mortgage, but the endless sigh that fluttered about father's name. He had been a more eloquent preacher than Mr. Black, mother declared, and after the second volume of his book was published (the book that had cost him two pulpits) famous men from all over the world had written to ask his opinion of the philosophers in the olden time. For he himself was one of the greatest. Had he lived long ago, mother had said, carefully pronouncing the syllables, he might have walked with Socrates, he might have been the companion of Plato.

There was a brief silence while the man and the child gazed up the steep road from the church to a grove of giant oaks and a red brick house flanked by a stony hill which was used as a pasture for three infirm sheep. The dwelling stood slightly withdrawn from the village, on land that had belonged to the Fincastles ever since Ironside had been a part of the frontier and John Fincastle had led his human flock up from the Indian savannahs, running in wild grass and pea-vine, to the bowed shoulder of the mountain. Near the timbered ridges he had felled trees and built the original manse, a cabin of round logs with a stone chimney. He had always believed, grandmother said, that the Lord had directed him to their grove of oaks in Shut-in Valley. Far into the night he had prayed, asking a sign, and in the morning when he had risen to fetch water he had seen a finger of light pointing straight from the sky to the topmost bough of an oak. After more than a century and a half, in which the log cabin had given way first to a small stone house and then to the square brick house, the Fincastle place was still known as 'the old manse', while the minister's home in the village was called 'the new parsonage'. The child, who had heard all this and much more, imagined that the fine town of Fincastle, and the lost county as well, had been named after the pioneer for whom God made a sign. But the minister might have told her, had he felt the wish to shatter a harmless myth, that these historic scenes commemorated not an act of God, but the family seat of Lord Botetourt in England.

'Is there anybody at the gate?' Mr. Black inquired presently, shielding his eyes from the sun. 'It may be only a sheep. It's queer, isn't it,' he continued solemnly, 'how little difference there is between a human being and a sheep to near-sighted eyes?'

The child laughed shyly because she knew, though it did not seem funny, that he expected her to be amused. ''Tis grandmother,' she replied. 'She's picking up sticks. Every evening, just before sundown, she goes out and picks up all the sticks that have dropped since the day before.'

The queer frown that bore so strong a resemblance to misery, and yet was not misery, distorted the minister's face. 'But that is bad for her rheumatism.'

'She doesn't stoop all the time. Father made her a pair of wooden tongs to pick up with.'

'Do you never help her?'

'We all pick up every evening. Sometimes father and I go down into the woods and gather the handcart full of light-wood. 'Tis a great saving,' she explained in an elderly tone, 'on the backlogs father cut last summer.'

'I dare say. Well, you'd better run home now and help your grandmother.'

'I'm not going home.' Her voice was faltering but brave. 'I'm going over to the flat rock by the big pine to watch for father.' Had the minister forgotten that Christmas was coming soon, and the Ladies' Missionary Society was holding a festival on Tuesday to raise money for the heathen in China?

'Is he going to bring you something?' Again he smiled, and again she thought in surprise, I am not afraid of him.

'He's going to bring me a doll with real hair.' Her eyes shone and the red drifted back into her cheeks.

'But won't a doll with real hair cost a good deal?'

'I saved up my berry money. Mrs. Rowan paid me two dollars and a half for picking berries for her last summer.'

'Will a doll cost all of two dollars and a half?'

'I hope not.' She appeared anxious, as indeed she was. 'I had to spend a dollar. I simply had to spend a dollar.'

'Well, run on. He may come sooner than you expect. Isn't the nearest way through the village?'

'No, sir, I know a sheep track over the fields. The track goes by the flat rock all the way down to Smiling Creek.'

But he had not, she realized after a moment, listened to a word she had said. His gaze was sweeping the Appalachian uplands and the unbroken chain of mountains to the farthest and highest blue summit. While she waited for him to dismiss her, she saw his mouth quiver and move stiffly in silent prayer. Then, as she was about to slip away, the words fluttered and came to roost on his lips. 'Whenever I look at God's Mountain, I know what is meant by the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.'

Vaguely bewildered, but still eager to be all that he required of a child who knew the Catechism by heart, she hesitated and raised her eyes to a face that had become luminous with worship. Then, turning away softly, she tied her knitted scarf over her head and ran into the near field to pick out the old sheep track, which was scarcely wider than a seam in the ground.

II

The child lay on the flat rock and watched the road that climbed through the small valleys within the Great Valley.

God's Mountain, father said, was the oversoul of Appalachian Virginia. Whenever she gazed at it alone for a long time, the heavenly blue seemed to flood into her heart and rise there in a peak. That must have been the first thing God created, and blue, she supposed, was the oldest colour in the world. When she was studying the Alps in her geography class, father had said that the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies were older. And the streams were old too. That was why there were no lakes or ponds in the hollows of Indian Rock County, not even in Campbell's Valley or Aunt Mary's Valley or Can't Whistle Creek Valley or, of course, in their very own Shut-in Valley. But there were many rivers and creeks and runs and trickling ice-green freshets from the melted snows in the mountains. Scattered among them, she could see the comfortable farmhouses, with roofs of red painted tin or grey weather-beaten shingles. For Shut-in Valley was not really shut in except at the farther end.

A doll with real hair--the thought ran in a bright skein through her mind. She had never in all her life had a doll with real hair. And she was buying it with her own money that she had earned, so she might look at it as soon as it came, without waiting for Christmas. Mother had given her a scrap of pink baby ribbon to tie round its head; she knew Aunt Meggie was making a dress as a surprise; and grandmother, she was almost sure, had crocheted a pink coat, and perhaps tiny shoes, of worsted for it to wear when she took it into the village. She would call it Flora because that name sounded pink and smooth and smiling, with yellow hair.

Leaning down from the rock, she looked far over Little River, which reflected the sky through shadows of scudding clouds. Immense, clear, glittering, the even summit of God's Mountain broke on the western horizon. She could smell the crystal scent of winter in the air, like the taste of wild strawberries. Nearer, yet still far away, she could make out the twin crests of Rain and Cloud Mountains, and when she turned and glanced over her shoulder, there was Thunder Mountain, the nearest of all. On the very top of Thunder Mountain, father said, there was a heap of brown stones. Nobody could tell how it had come there, or why the Indians had raised it. Some people believed it was the burial mound of an Indian chief. But father thought that when the Shawnees went by on the warpath, each brave had dropped a stone as an offering to the Great Spirit, just as she dropped a penny in the plate Deacon McClung passed in church.

When she was old enough she meant to climb the mountain and see for herself. That was one of the things mother had always longed to do and had never done. 'Some day when we have nothing important to do,' mother said, 'and I don't have to lie on a sofa to spare my back, we'll take a whole day out of life and climb to the very top of Thunder Mountain. We'll go up as high as the Indian mount. From there we can see nearly to the end of the world.' And ever since she was little, the child had asked, 'Is the end of the world blue, mother?'

Lower down on Thunder Mountain you could still see signs of the Shawnee warpath. Indian trail, they called it; and Ralph McBride had followed it with some deer-hunters last autumn. Over that trail the Shawnees had come for the massacre of Smiling Creek. Ralph had found arrow-heads and part of a tomahawk down under the rocks in the deepest bottom of the creek. When the Indians went back they had taken Great-great-grandmother Tod away into captivity. A little girl she had been, ten years old, no bigger than Ada. She had lived for seven long years a captive in a Shawnee village. When she was sixteen, they had married her to a young chief, and she had gone into his wigwam. Then peace with the red men had come soon afterwards, and when she was seventeen she was returned under the treaty, father said, that ended Pontiac's War. After all she had endured, she lived to be over a hundred.

In the middle of the road by the flat rock, two of the mountain people, a man and a boy, were swinging by with a slow, even gait. As they passed, they looked up and nodded gravely, and she nodded back without speaking. 'Somebody must be sick up there,' she thought; for the mountaineers seldom came down in winter, except to buy Jamaica ginger, or to summon Dr. Updike to visit the dying. Father had told her that they were a stalwart breed, the true American highlanders. In pioneer days their forefathers had fled from the strict settlements, some because they could breathe only in freedom, and others to escape punishment for crimes against the laws of the Tidewater. But old black Aunt Abigail Geddy, who had Indian blood, muttered that there were fearful sights in the hills if you knew where to look for them. She had once gone to Panther's Gap to help grandmother take care of a family of half-wits. Three generations of half-wits, from a chattering crone of a granny to a newborn baby barely a day old! And the baby was the worst. If it had been a kitten, she said, they would have tossed it straight into Panther's Run. Aunt Abigail would have mumbled on over her pipe until the child was quaking with horror. But just as she approached the hair-raising part, mother came into the kitchen and spoke so severely that the old woman could never be persuaded to return to the subject. She would only shake her head and mutter that folks in Panther's Gap were all as poor as Job's turkey.

Ever since she was too little to lace her own shoes, Ada had wondered what it meant to be poor. She remembered, too, the very moment her wondering began. It was when she was five years old, and grandmother had taken her frock of yellow sprigged calico to give to the poor McAllisters, who lived up the road. She had loved her yellow sprigged frock, and she had hated to give it away. When she had cried, grandmother, who was rummaging in her closets to find clothes to put into a basket, had reproved her and said she ought to be glad to divide with God's poor. 'Are we poor, Grandmother?' she had asked. 'Not so poor,' grandmother had replied, 'as the poor McAllisters.' 'What does it mean,' the child had persisted, 'to be poor?' 'It means,' grandmother had answered, 'not to have enough to eat. It means not to have enough clothes to cover you.' 'Oh, then, we aren't poor, grandmother,' Ada had cried joyfully. 'We have two bags of cornmeal in the storeroom, and two sides of bacon in the smokehouse, and a patch full of sweet potatoes in the garden. And all of us,' she had added in triumph, 'have our new red flannel petticoats for next winter.' Then mother had dropped on her knees, crying, while she folded her in her arms, 'You're right, darling,' she had said, 'we aren't really poor, and we have much to be thankful for.'

The shadow of the big pine had fallen aslant the rock, and rolling over in the crisp air, which was not too cold, Ada looked across the fields to the village and the stone chimneys of the church above the bare boughs in the churchyard. She knew the story of that church by heart, and she could listen for ever, she thought, to the adventures of the first settlers, as grandmother told them.

'Ours is a little church, but we have loved it,' grandmother would begin. 'Even if we've never been so well off as the congregations at New Providence and Timber Ridge and Falling Springs, still we were appointed to our humble work in the Lord's vineyard. The Fincastles, too, were always simple folk, though they had learning, and were as good as the best.'

'And are we as good as the best now, Grandmother?' Ada would ask.

'In everything but circumstances, my child. The Craigies were even less well-to-do than the Fincastles; but they were rooted like oaks.'

Scottish-Irish, people called the pioneers, though after they were driven out of Strathclyde they had stayed to themselves in Ulster, and had seldom or never crossed blood with the Irish. John Fincastle had brought his flock with him from County Donegal, all the elders and deacons of his church and a few humbler members of his congregation. They had sailed from Ulster in the ship Martha and Mary, and it had taken them one hundred and eighteen days to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Philadelphia. At first they had settled and practised their religion in Pennsylvania; but after a few restless years, the bolder spirits among the Ulstermen had pushed southward, with their families, over the old Indian Road, into Virginia. The Scholar Pioneer, the immigrants named John Fincastle, because he had brought not only his Bible, but as much of his library as he could stow away into a pack. Grandmother would chuckle over the legend that he had reduced his wife's pots and kettles to a single vessel in order to make room for volumes of profane learning. 'That's how your father came by his reason, if not by his use of it. Though I'm far from denying,' she would sigh, 'that, in spite of his backsliding, he is still a man of good parts.'

But the worst was not over. A thrilling quaver would creep into grandmother's voice. When the Indian Road led them into Virginia, they found the settlement too contentious for a worshipper who wanted peace with his Maker. After a few months John Fincastle thrust out toward the frontier. The mood of the wilderness flowed into him and ebbed back again. He was pursuing the dream of a free country, the dream of a country so vast that each man would have room to bury his dead on his own land.

The pioneers who had gone ahead had left not a single track, not even the print of a hoof, in the Indian meadows. There was nothing to guide them except the sun and the stars, and occasionally the faint signs of Indian hunters. No wagons could travel the wilderness, and all they needed, even profane learning, had to be carried on packhorses. No wonder, after climbing hills, fording rivers, defying forests, that a spear of light should seem to them to be the finger of Providence. Their first act was to drop on their knees; their first thought was to build a house of divine worship. But years passed before they could assemble material for the Ironside church, with the floor of walnut puncheons, the high-backed pews, the stone stairways to the gallery.

When the ground was broken, all the families in the clearings left their brush-harrows and ploughs and hastened with saws, axes, and hammers to the spot where they had knelt in the sunrise. Men and women worked together building the walls, and every grain of sand to make mortar was brought by the women on horseback. Mrs. Ettrick, a woman of great strength, was surprised by a redskin when she was fording a creek, but she felled him with the single blow of a hatchet and galloped back to warn the men who bore muskets. Grandmother's words would drop thick and fast, like the pelting of hail, while Ada's flesh crawled with fear that was somehow delicious.

John Fincastle was a merciful man. Though he was a trespasser on the hunting-grounds of the Indians, he became their friend and protector. Only his renowned piety had saved him from death when he tried to defend innocent tribes. He never forgave the settlers, especially his own militia, for the murder of Cornstalk. In his last years, when he was upwards of eighty, and his eldest son, John II, had succeeded him in his ministry, he abandoned what was then called civilization (here grandmother would pause to shake her head), and went alone into the wilderness as a missionary to the Shawnees. All his worldly needs, he had declared, could be strapped on his back. He carried with him two Bibles and one other book, a copy in his own handwriting of the Meditations of a Heathen Emperor who had not even been converted and saved. That made some people think his years were beginning to tell on him. It seemed, whatever way you looked at it, a strange thing to do.

'Remember, my child, that you have strong blood,' grandmother would end proudly, for her forefathers, the Craigies, had been members of John Fincastle's flock. 'Never let it be weakened. Thin blood runs to wickedness.'

The sun was going down in a blaze, but as it sank behind the hills it shot up again in a fountain of light and scattered a sparkling spray into the clouds. Cramped from waiting so long, Ada felt that a chill had begun to creep up from the rock, where the sunshine had vanished, through the thickness of her woollen stockings and squirrel-skin coat. Springing to her feet, she jumped up and down until warmth ran in pinpricks over her arms and legs. When she moved to the edge of the rock, she could look through the last faded leaves on the oaks, which glimmered with a bluish tone in the flushed light, and see the dormer-windows and the sloping shingled roof of the manse. The darkness of ivy was flung over the square front porch, with ends that groped toward the western wall and laced back the green shutters.

In the side yard, over the fallen leaves, a dusky shape moved near the ground, and she knew that it was Horace on his way from Aunt Abigail Geddy's cabin, which he visited between meals in the hope of a sop of corn pone and gravy. The Geddys were the only coloured family in Ironside; they were all upright and independent, and they were proud of their Indian blood and straight features. Aunt Abigail had lived at the manse for forty-odd years. After father lost his church and had no money to pay her wages, she had stayed on because she said it was respectable to work for a minister, whether he preached or not, and her cabin between the garden and the sheep pasture, behind the row of sunflowers Aunt Meggie raised every summer for chicken feed, was all the home that she wanted. It was a good cabin. There were two rooms with a big stone fireplace and a floor of double boards to defend the old woman's bones from the dampness. Her son, Marcellus Geddy, had plastered the walls and whitewashed them within and without.

Between the green shutters the red eye of a window blinked from under the ivy, and while the child watched the flickering gleam she seemed to be in two places at once. The dusky shape of Horace barked at the door. It opened and shut again behind him when he had padded into the hall. Grandmother had filled her basket with sticks long ago, and had gone in to take up the ball of brown yarn and her steel knitting needles. She would sit erect in her deep chair with wings on her own side of the fireplace, near the lamp on the round table and the front window where the shutters were held back by ivy. The big front room was mother's chamber. A log fire burned there all the time, and after supper the family gathered in front of the great fireplace to pray with grandmother, and to listen to father when he read aloud a chapter from Old Mortality. In one corner there was a high tester bed, and Ada's own trundle-bed, in which she had slept ever since she was a baby, was rolled out at night from under the hanging fringe of the counterpane. All the furniture, except a rosewood bookcase and sofa from the parsonage in Queenborough, was made of walnut or pine and had furnished the manse in her great-great-grandfather's day.

Grandmother was the kind of person you saw better when you were not looking straight at her. Even when she was young, mother said, she could never have been handsome; but she had the sort of ugliness that is more impressive than beauty. Her figure was tall, strong, rugged; her face reminded the child of the rock profile at Indian Head; and her eyes, small, bright, ageless, were like the eyes of an eaglet that had peered out from a crevice under the rock. At seventy, her eyebrows were still black and bushy, and in the left one there was a large brown mole from which three stiff black hairs bristled as sharply as needles in a pin-cushion. Summer and winter, except on the Sabbath, she wore the same dresses of black and grey calico with very full skirts, and a little crocheted shawl of grey or lavender wool was flung over her shoulders whenever she felt the edge of a chill. Ada had never seen her without a cap on her thick hair, which was not white but grizzled. Even when her lumbago was so painful that she could not get out of bed, and a fire had to be kept up all night in her room, she would ask for her muslin day cap with its bunch of narrow black ribbon before she would swallow a morsel of breakfast.

Mother, who could never sit still, would be moving about, helping Aunt Meggie in the kitchen (for three days Aunt Abigail Geddy had been crippled with rheumatism), or running out on the porch to look for father or for Ada herself. Then in a flash, hurrying and laughing as she hurried, she would dart in through another door, crying, 'I forgot something! I know I forgot something, but I can't think what it was I forgot!' She was always like that, gay, amused, beautiful, even when she was faded and weather-beaten, making fun where there was no fun.

For a few years after she lost her two little sons from diphtheria, Aunt Meggie said, the heart had seemed to go out of her. But when father was obliged to resign from his church in Queenborough, and everything became suddenly so bad that it looked as if it could not be worse, mother grew brighter than she had ever been. She talked all the time, and no matter how poor they were, she could always find something to laugh at, if it were nothing more amusing than poverty. Yet it was true, as she would repeat over and over in her bright, tremulous voice, they had much to be thankful for. Never, as far back as Ada could remember, had they been hungry. Even if they needed clothes, and grandmother re-dipped and turned and pressed the ribbon on her caps until it was worn to a fringe, they had never been without corn bread and brown gravy and all the dried beans and peas and tinned tomatoes that Aunt Meggie gathered in their garden and put up with the help of Aunt Abigail Geddy.

III

The dying flare of the sun cast a rust-coloured light down into the valley, and across this light a long black shape wavered suddenly from the blue crook in the hills.

That must be the two-horse gig, with father and Mr. Rowan side by side on the small seat. But was it? She couldn't be sure. Yes . . . no. Oh, it was, it was . . . Lightly as a squirrel, she balanced herself on the edge of the rock, bounded with a single flying leap into the road, and raced down toward the bottom of the hill, where the gig was splashing through a puddle before taking the climb. Like an enormous crow, the shadow hesitated, flapped, and then flitted onward before the vehicle, as if shadow and substance were two separate bodies. At last he was coming. He was bringing her doll with real hair that she could brush and comb and perhaps roll up in curl-papers. As she ran on, her breath came in gasps and words floated in wisps of fog out of her mouth. Never had she been so happy before. Her heart felt as if it would bubble over with joy.

'Did you bring it, Father?' she called, and he answered in his distant voice, so unlike her mother's near and thrilling tones, 'Yes, I brought it, my child. I did the best I could.' When the gig reached her, she was lifted into it and settled snugly between father's hard lean figure and Mr. Rowan's soft bulging one.

'I reckon he's got something for you stuffed away in that basket with the coffee and sugar,' Mr. Rowan remarked pleasantly. She had always liked him, even if he was Janet's father and Janet would tag after her when she went climbing with Ralph. It wasn't any fun to climb with a baby that fell down and scratched her knee and then sat in the briars and cried if you didn't come back for her. But Mr. Rowan had a pleasant face (a red face was more cheerful, especially in winter time, than a pale one) and he had a good habit of carrying pink and white sugar animals in his pocket. This was because of Janet. Aunt Abigail said they had spoiled Janet till she was rotten, and some day, when the Lord had time to attend to it, they would be punished.

'It's a doll with real hair. I bought it with my berry money.'

'Well, well, I wish Janet would turn her hand to making money. She's never bought anything for herself.'

'But she's always had a wax doll this high.' She measured the height in the air. 'It's so beautiful she won't let any of us play with it.'

'Is that so? Well, I tell you what we'll do. You bring your doll to Janet's Christmas tree and we'll all play together.'

Daylight and shadow had both vanished now, and there was only the thin dusk on the road. Past the flat rock into the village, where she saw Mr. Borrows shutting his shop, and Judge Melrose walking along the cinder-strewn sidewalk with his brown spaniel Ruddy, and a white horse before the door of old Mr. Wertenbaker, who had come from the Shenandoah Valley, and Janet Rowan waving her hand to her father, and Ralph McBride opening the gate before the small house where his mother, a widow but proud, worked so hard to keep a roof over their heads. Then on beyond the church into the steep short road which led through the big gate that sagged on its hinges, and over the crackling dead leaves in the yard of the manse.

'Well, I'll be turning home,' Mr. Rowan said, smiling and friendly, as he picked her up and swung her to the ground. 'It's been a long day, and we'll both be glad of a good supper with bed at the end of it. A cold wave is coming. We may have snow again by to-morrow.'

The gig rolled through the gate; the crackling died away in the leaves; there was the sound of wheels growing fainter; and then suddenly mother's voice called eagerly from the porch. 'Have you come, John?'

'May I have it now, Father?' the child asked.

They were standing under the oaks, and she waited while he glanced down uncertainly at the basket. His figure, tall, spare, with the straight spine of an Indian, seemed to sink into and become a part of the twilight.

'May I have my doll now, Father?' she asked again.

Stooping over the basket, he lifted the lid and drew out an oblong parcel wrapped in brown paper and neatly tied with a store string. 'I did the best I could, my child,' he repeated, as he put it into her hands. 'After the mortgage was settled, it took all I had left to buy coffee and sugar for your grandmother. She is old, and it's a deprivation for her to go without coffee.'

But she held the parcel tight, without untying the string or taking in a word that he said. Suddenly the whole world was swimming in bliss, the blue twilight, the dark afterglow, the far-off benevolent shape of God's Mountain. 'I'll undo it inside,' she whispered, catching her breath. 'I'll wait for mother and grandmother.'

Wheeling round, she ran across the yard, over the dead leaves which sighed as cheerfully as if they were not really dead. She would always remember that happy rustling underfoot, and the clinging smoky scents that sprang up out of the twilight--scents of earth and winter and frosty darkness, all shot through and mingled with a sensation of joy, a quiver of expectancy.

The door opened and shut. She ran into the room, straight to the fireplace, where grandmother was knitting and mother had hurried in, after calling father, to throw lightwood knots on the flames.

'He's come, Mother. He's brought my doll.'

'I'm glad, dear. I'm glad you have what you've wanted so much.' Mother's eyes, as she turned from the fire, were like lamps under a dark shade, and her thin cheeks, where all the dimples were sucked into hollows, were flaming with colour.

Grandmother peered over her spectacles, though her knitting needles continued to click busily, and Aunt Meggie, who was tying on an apron on her way to the kitchen, stopped and glanced back, with her round cheerful face and funny slanting eyes beneath wisps of sandy hair that strayed over her forehead.

'The only dolls little girls had in my day were rag dolls,' grandmother said, with a smile. 'Rag or corncob or hickory nut. I remember somebody, 'twas a member of your great-grandfather's congregation, gave me a wooden doll with arms and legs on hinges, and I nearly went out of my wits for happiness.' The sense of fun played over her as dawn skims over a mountain crag.

Mother laughed. 'But your day was different. The world has grown, and children have more nowadays.' She sighed under her breath, the kind of sigh, Ada knew, that meant she was thinking of all they used to have before father became a philosopher instead of a minister.

'Hadn't you better keep it for Christmas?' Aunt Meggie asked. 'There won't be much for Christmas this year.'

'Oh, no, let her open it,' mother said. 'She bought it with her own money.'

Ada's fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely pick out the knot in the store string that must be saved.

'I'm going to name her Flora,' she cried. 'I think Flora is the prettiest name in the world.' Her voice broke off, rose again in a sharp cry, and quavered into a sobbing moan.

'Oh, Mother, Mother, she isn't real! She isn't anything in the world but china like Nellie. Her hair is just china!'

It was true. Mother and grandmother and Aunt Meggie stared down at the black glazed head as it emerged from the sawdust. Then, stooping quickly, mother snatched the doll from the box, and said in a bright, anxious voice, 'She has a nice face, darling. Perhaps there weren't any better.' Grandmother's needles stopped for a minute, and Horace, on the rug near the fire, raised his head and thumped his tail slowly.

'But I don't want a china doll, Mother. Nellie is china.' Darkness overwhelmed her. All the shining bliss was blotted out as suddenly as it had flashed into light. Her heart sank down, far, far down into emptiness, and instead of the happy sighing of the leaves she heard only a mournful whisper from the flames that crawled over the lightwood knots on their way into smoke. Never, never as long as she lived would she have a doll with real hair that she could comb and brush. Something would always stand in the way. First she had lost all the money she had saved; it had slipped through the lining of her squirrel-skin coat before mother mended the rent in her pocket. Then one season had been too poor for berries and the next season they had been too plentiful. And she was already outgrowing the age for dolls. Grandmother reminded her of this every day. Little girls of ten years had had their useful tasks in grandmother's childhood. They had carded wool or hemmed cloth or stitched a sampler like the one grandmother herself had worked when she was only seven, with the picture of a church and a white steeple and a few birds flying. At the age of ten, grandmother insisted, little girls should be taught their responsibilities.

'I don't want it, Mother. I don't want china hair.'

'We'll hear what father has to say, darling. Perhaps it isn't so bad as it seems. She has a nice face, and I'll make her a dress and a bonnet out of that pink gingham I'd put away.'

'As soon as my hens begin laying again, I'll buy you a doll, Ada,' said Aunt Meggie, who possessed the treasure of a practical mind. 'Try not to give way to disappointment. Think how sad the world would be if we all gave way to disappointment.'

But the child had ceased to care what became of the world. She had waited and saved; she had denied herself sticks of painted peppermint candy when the other children were sucking; and all the time she was growing farther from the age of play and nearer to the dreadful age of tasks. There was the bedstead, too, that Ralph McBride, who could carve almost anything, had made for her last Christmas. It was waiting now in the cupboard where she kept her playthings. The posts were smooth and round and fitted together, and there was a carved acorn in the middle of the headboard. Nellie hadn't looked just right in that bed, especially after Aunt Meggie had given her a tick of feathers to put on the slats and mother had made sheets and pillows and even a blanket. A doll with real hair that opened her eyes in the morning and shut them at night was what the bed needed. And now Nellie would have a companion like herself, with a body that was sawdust as far as the neck and coal black hair that was as hard as her face.

'Aunt Meggie is right, Ada,' mother was repeating in her voice of strained sweetness which sounded as if it were on the verge of breaking, yet never broke. 'Try not to take things so hard.'

'But Janet Rowan takes things hard, Mother, and she has all the dolls she wants.'

'I know, Ada, but the Rowans are rich, and we are poor. Don't envy them, dear. We are happier than they are.'

Above the murmur of the flames she heard grandmother heave one of her great sighs which shook her from head to foot, immense as she was, and remark sternly, yet not without sympathy, to mother, 'The child has a single heart, Mary Evelyn, and that will always bear watching. Jealousy is the flaw in the single heart.'

'Ada has never been jealous,' mother answered quickly, while the red in her cheeks stained her throat. 'You can't expect a child not to feel disappointment.'

'I didn't say that to hurt you,' grandmother rejoined gently. 'Ada is a good child.'

'Don't cry, dear,' mother said, folding the child in her arms. 'Your father is coming in. Try not to let him see how much this has meant to you.'

First the hall door and then the chamber door opened and shut. Horace sprang to his feet with a bark. The smell of winter was blown into the room on waves of freshness; and her father entered with a step that dragged from weariness after his long drive and his hard day. Crossing the floor, he kissed his wife and held out his hand to his mother, who did not favour casual endearments.

'I did the best I could, Mary Evelyn,' he said, flinching from mental or physical pain. 'I know the child is disappointed, but I did the best I could. There wasn't a wax doll with real hair for less than three dollars. The cheaper ones had been sold for a festival.'

'I know you did the best you could, John,' mother replied quickly, with a gesture as if she were patting and smoothing. 'Ada is disappointed, of course, but Meggie is going to buy a doll for her as soon as the hens begin laying well. This one has a pretty face even if she has china hair, and she will look lovely after I've dressed her. You must be half starved. Sit down and get warm while I make the coffee. Meggie has everything ready, and think what a treat it will be to have coffee and sugar again.'

With her sprightly walk, she hurried out into the hall, and Ada heard the rustling of paper as the parcels were carried through the dining-room into the kitchen. The other side of the house was dark now and cold. The front room was father's library, where he worked far into the night, though he never had a fire except when his hands became so frostbitten that he could not close his fingers over his pen. Grandmother had knitted a jersey for him of thick yarn, but in the coldest weather he wrote in his greatcoat and sometimes even with his hat on, or one of grandmother's little shawls tied over his head. Mother begged him to have a fire, and sometimes she would light one without his seeing her do it. Yet even in winter it was a cheerful room, and in summer it was the nicest place in the house because of the shining backs of books on the walls and the view from the front windows of God's Mountain, which seemed closer there than anywhere else. Some of the books had always been there. They belonged to great-great-great-grandfather's theological library, and this had been increased year by year in each generation. Then there were all the works on philosophy father had bought when he was a student in London. He would sometimes talk to them of the two years he had spent there, and Ada would listen breathlessly to his account of the house and the landlady in Bloomsbury, where he had lodged. Every day, as soon as the doors were opened, he would go into the Reading Room of the British Museum, and he would stay there until it closed, except for half an hour when he went out for a cup of tea and some slices of bread and butter. It must have been a dull life, mother thought, but he had loved it. He had been as happy, he said, as the day was long. Yet Ada had overheard grandmother telling Aunt Meggie in the middle of the night that his years in London and in the British Museum had been 'the ruination of John'.

The aroma of coffee was wafted in, and grandmother tossed her head with a spirited gesture, in the way an old mare will do when she feels the spring in her bones. Presently mother would call them back into the kitchen and they would pass the closed door of the parlour, where all the ugly green benches and the stove for wood were waiting for Monday morning and the rows of pupils who came to be taught, among other branches of learning, profane history and geography, but not sacred.

The kitchen door must have opened again, for a new smell, the warm, kindling, delicious smell of frying bacon, curled up brown and crisp at the ends, mingled with the aroma of coffee. On any other night, the child would have been the first in the kitchen, helping and watching, but she still suffered from the memory of Flora, and all her appetite seemed to have fled. She thought distantly of the table mother adorned with flowers or winter berries in the blue bowl she loved, and would let no one else wash, because it was exactly the colour of God's Mountain. The blue bowl had been one of her wedding presents, but the four silver candlesticks, which she set out even when she had no candles to put in them, had belonged to great-grandmother Fincastle, the one who had been a Graham. Good food, grandmother said, needed no trimming, but mother had a way of living that made everything pretty. She was glad that the candlesticks were not solid silver, that copper gleamed through in places where they were worn. The copper, she would say with a laugh, was more precious than silver, for it was the only thing that had kept them from being turned into money. It was mother, of course, who kept a row of red geraniums on the kitchen window-sill and had arranged what she called her 'winter bouquets' in the old earthenware crocks on the hall table.

'You need something to eat, John,' grandmother said suddenly, as she let her knitting fall in her lap. Her nostrils quivered with pleasure when the smell floated in, for she had a hearty relish for food. Not, as she complained, for the dishes provided by her daughter-in-law's pernickety taste, but for coarse, strong, nourishing fare with a body of its own that stayed by her.

'Rowan gave me a bite, but I wasn't hungry.' Father spoke dreamily, as if only the fringes of his thoughts were engaged in his answer. 'Yes, I shall be glad of a cup of coffee.'

Going over to the cupboard in the corner, Ada took out the doll's bedstead and stood it on the floor beside her own trundle-bed. When she had put a nightgown on the new doll, she laid her beside Nellie between the sheets. Even if she couldn't love her, she might still name her Flora.

Hurrying in, with her sweet and anxious expression, mother said gaily, 'Supper is ready, and nobody is going to be disappointed.'

Her forehead and temples were pinched with neuralgia; the tendons jerked like cords in her throat; and the colour in her haggard cheeks looked as if it had been burned there by a flame. But the lovely contour, the perfect oval, of her face had resisted time and disease. A strange happiness, more a quality than an emotion, as ethereal and as penetrating as light, rippled in her voice and shone steadily in her eyes and smile.

IV

'Twas the three cups of coffee that put the heart into me and will make me sleep sound, grandmother Fincastle thought; for she had scant patience with the feeble folk who are at the mercy of nerves and let anything in the nature of food or drink keep them awake.

Bending over with difficulty, she eased her foot, which had begun to swell, from the square cloth boot with elastic sides and stretched it out on the warm bricks, where the kettle steamed, the firelight shifted, and a skeleton spider, pale as a ghost, was spinning a single strand of cobweb over the pile of back-logs near the chimney. For an instant, while she raised her head, she felt that the room receded and swam in a ruddy haze before it emerged again in its true pattern. The material form had dissolved into a fluid, into a memory. Then once more the actuality triumphed; the immediate assumed its old power and significance.

She saw the big warm chamber glimmering with firelight. Mary Evelyn now slept here, but she herself had slept here long ago, as a bride, a wife, and a mother. Aye, she had much to be thankful for, shelter and warmth, and all the creature comforts she had missed in her youth . . . There was that mouse again scampering in the far corner. She hoped Meggie had not forgotten to put down the mousetrap.

She liked the soft, bright colours in the rag carpet, woven by her own hands out of scraps the congregation had saved for her. She liked the home-made furniture of walnut or pine better than the carved rosewood Mary Evelyn had brought from Queenborough. She liked the great bed, so substantial that it took two men to push it, and the patchwork quilt which was brought out at night when the fringed counterpane was removed. Nobody nowadays had the patience or the eyesight to make that Star of Bethlehem pattern. Work like that belonged to another time. But it looked comfortable on the foot of the bed, with the child's trundle-bed rolled out and prepared for the night.

All grandmother's children had slept in that trundle-bed, the seven she had lost, the two who were living, and she had grown fond of it. It was the only piece of furniture she had brought from Giles County, where her father had lived when she was a child. 'I'm going to make a sofa out of that old trundle-bed, Mr. Fincastle,' she had murmured, blushing when Adam, her husband (though it would not have been respectful to think of him by his Christian name), had smiled at the sight of it. But she had known when she spoke that the trundle-bed would never be turned into a sofa.

Her youth had suffered from hardships; she had spent her childhood in a log cabin, yet she had not been ashamed. When she was five years old her father was called to a mission on Wildcat Mountain, and from that time she had not seen a railway train until she was grown. Mr. Fincastle had met her when he came to preach at the mission, and he had felt from the first minute, he told her afterwards, that this also was appointed. That was the Sabbath she was admitted to sealing ordinances. But even before she had reached the years of discretion, her faith had been strong. When she was no bigger than a slip of a girl she had felt that she was ready to do or die, or even to be damned, if it would redound to the greater glory of God.

Though she knew that bricks are no more than straws in the sight of the Lord, she would always remember how wonderful the manse had appeared to her, as a bride, when she had first seen it on a spring morning. Everything had seemed to her to be provided; the grove of oaks to cast shade; the vegetable garden at the back of the house, the well so close to the kitchen porch; the springhouse at the bottom of the yard under the big willow; and the house inside, with the solid furniture, the rows of books that had always been there, and the shining pewter plates, so bright you could see your face in them, on the sideboard. She could imagine nothing more luxurious than eating in a dining-room, with a cloth on the table, and having hot water to wash in. As a bride she used to say that she praised the Lord whenever she took up that big kettle from the trivet in front of the fire. And she thanked Mr. Fincastle's father, too, for the kitchen, nearly if not quite so large as the front chamber. He had built that for his wife, Margaret, who had brought a family of servants.

Margaret Graham was an extraordinary character, and she was still beautiful as grandmother remembered her. She had known wealth, for she was the daughter of Squire Graham of Glenburnie, who had inherited a fortune in land and died dispossessed. When she was married to the third John, she infused a romantic legend, as well as an aristocratic strain, into the Fincastle stock. There was a cherished tradition that the Graham ancestor who had fled from Scotland to Ireland in 1650 was a near kinsman of the great Montrose. 'No, we were not always with the Covenanters,' grandmother thought, shaking her head while she tucked the ball of yarn between her thigh and the cushion. Old John, the pioneer, had said that he fought not against men, but against evil passions both within and without the Kirk. The present John had inherited his grandmother's straight features and her eyes--bright blue, with a crystal gaze that seemed to pierce the heart in its search for truth. When she first came as a bride, the ruling elders had requested her to wear a veil in church, so that her beauty might not distract men's thoughts from the eloquence of her husband. After that, she had worn a green barège veil over her bonnet. But it was not Mr. Fincastle's father, John III, who had built the brick house. They had John II to thank for that. When he was well on in life, a relative in Scotland had left him a legacy. Not a fortune as people thought nowadays, but enough to build a brick manse and to enlarge the church over the old house of worship. With what was left, he had placed a sandstone slab at the head of every Fincastle grave in the churchyard. His father, John I, was buried there. A week before his death, when he was out of his head, the Shawnees had brought him back, mourning as they would have mourned for a great chief.

How in the world, grandmother still asked herself, had those early settlers been able to enjoy living without such simple comforts as feather beds and kettles of hot water? In fear, too, whenever they had taken time to stop and think, of the savages. Yet they also had loved life. They had loved it the more, John would tell her, because it was fugitive; they had loved it for the sake of the surprise, the danger, the brittleness of the moment. Her husband, she knew, had felt this, though what he had said sounded so different. Life will yield up its hidden sweetness, she had heard him preach from the pulpit, only when it is being sacrificed to something more precious than life.

They had believed this in the old days. Time and again, they had risen from the ruins of happiness. Yet they had gone on; they had rebuilt the ruins; they had scattered life more abundantly over the ashes. There was a near neighbour of her grandfather who had held his cabin twice when others fled to the stockade. For the sake of his crop, he had held his ground. All within the space of ten years, he had seen two wives and two families of children scalped and killed by the savages. He himself had once been left to die, and a second time he had escaped from an Indian village and made his way home through the wilderness. For the rest of his life he had worn a handkerchief tied over his head, and one Sunday morning, while the congregation sang the Doxology, he had fallen down in a fit. In his later years he had married a third wife and had brought up a new family, after the manner of Job, to inherit the land. Though he had seen men burned at the stake, he had never lost his trust in Divine goodness.

And nearer still, there was her own grandmother, Martha Tod. She had liked the young chief too well, people had whispered. He was a noble figure; he had many virtues; she had wept when they came to redeem her. One story ran that her Indian husband had come to the settlement in search of her, and that her two brothers had killed him in the woods, from ambush, and had hidden his body. This may have been true, and again it may not have been. The age was a wild one. Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practise religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature. Whatever happened, Martha Tod's lips were sealed tight. No one, not even her mother, had ever won her confidence again, or heard her speak of her life with the Shawnees. But as long as she lived, after her marriage to an elder in the church, she had suffered from spells of listening, a sort of wildness, which would steal upon her in the fall of the year, especially in the blue haze of weather they called Indian summer. Then she would leap up at the hoot of an owl or the bark of a fox and disappear into the forest. When she returned from these flights, her husband would notice a strange stillness in her eyes, as if she were listening to silence. But gradually, as her children grew up, ten of them in all, fine, sturdy, professing Christians, her affliction became lighter. To the end of her days, even after her reason had tottered, she could still card, spin, weave, dye, or knit as well as the best of them. Grandmother had heard that when she was dying, her youth, with the old listening look, had flashed back into her face, and she had tried to turn toward the forest. But that was too much to credit. It couldn't have happened. Not when her mind was addled, not when she was well over a hundred. Grandmother remembered her well, an old, old woman with a face like a skull, mumbling over her pipe in the chimney corner.

Was it true, grandmother wondered, looping the yarn round the thought, was it true that wildness could be handed down in the blood? Could Martha Tod's spells have skipped her own children and broken out again in John's heresy? Yet Martha Tod had been as innocent as a lamb. Never, even in captivity, had she doubted that only through the blood of Christ could she be redeemed.

Jerking up her head, which had nodded a moment, the old woman glanced at her son on the other side of the lamp, and thought in surprise, 'But he has a fine face!' Whenever she looked at him, no matter how many times in the day, she was startled afresh, as if she had never seen him before. How could a man who denied the Virgin Birth wear a countenance that seemed, when he was plunged within, to be cut out of light? He had looked like that, she recalled with a pang, when he had stood his trial for heresy and schism (nothing, not even the loss of her husband and her seven children, had caused her such anguish); but in later years, since his hair had whitened (though he was only forty-four), the thinness and clearness of his features had become more striking. She had ascribed it all, his loss of zeal, his backsliding, the resignation from his church in Queenborough, the final trial before the Presbytery that deposed him--all these misfortunes she had ascribed to the influence of the British Museum, and to the sinister volumes (never would she have glanced into one of them) that he had bought at such sacrifices (he had gone without a greatcoat; he had even gone without food) when he was a student.

Mary Evelyn, too, had encouraged him when she should have admonished. A cruel doctrine, she had called predestination, and once, while the trial lasted, she had cried out that she believed anything John believed, that she would rather be damned with John than saved without him. Yet grandmother had loved her better than she loved Meggie, who was one of the elect, assured of salvation. But Mary Evelyn had needed her more. She had made the heartbreaking appeal of the dying or the poverty-stricken. Though she was happy, her happiness, like her beauty, was too ardent to seem natural. And she had never had a family of her own. Her parents had died before she was old enough to remember them, and she had been left--an orphan, and what was far worse in the Tidewater, a poor orphan. The relatives who had brought her up had been elderly and unkind. It is true that she had been, for a few years, a belle and a beauty, but worldliness, as nobody knew better than grandmother, was without staying power.

After Mary Evelyn's marriage to John her worldly friends had forsaken her. Then the last of her relatives had passed away, and she had turned to grandmother, when her children died of diphtheria, as she might have turned to the Rock of Ages had her mind been less given to flightiness. A cross she had been, 'twas true, but a cross that pressed into the heart. If only her love for John had been a strength instead of a weakness. And worse than a weakness. In some obscure way, almost an infirmity of the flesh. For how could a man like John, with that queer absent-minded attitude of a thinker who is more dreamer than thinker, satisfy any woman?

His father had been different. Blessed with a robust constitution, he had loved, as he had lived, robustly. They had had perfect sympathy and great satisfaction in marriage. When grandmother looked back on it now, it seemed to her that she had enjoyed everything, even childbirth. There had been pangs, of course (though never the long spasms of agony that had tortured Mary Evelyn's frail body), but the pains were so soon forgotten in the joy of bringing a child into the world. Could her children be born again, she would bear with gladness every pang, great or small, that she had suffered. But nothing could take her family away from her, not even death. They were still united, the dead and the living. And Mary Evelyn was one of them, as dear as her own. Yet she was wasting away. Year by year, she was wasting away under John's eyes, who had never so much as noticed the change in her. He thought her perfect, he said, when what she needed was plenty of milk and custards and delicate food. That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

But it was a mercy, with the mortgage falling due, that John had been able to pay the premium on his insurance. Small as it was, they had had a struggle to meet the payments and to find something they could turn into money. There were only a few silver spoons left, and these were so old and thin and brittle that they would break when you washed them. Three thousand dollars wouldn't go far nowadays. But if anything should happen to John, even that little might tide Mary Evelyn over the first year or so. Neither Mary Evelyn nor Meggie would let her speak of the insurance. For her part, she had a practical mind; she had always looked ahead; she had never expected life to be easy. Not after John's trial, not after he had told the Presbytery he rejected the God of Abraham but accepted the God of Spinoza.

That was the beginning--or was it the end?--of his ruin. The most brilliant mind in the church, they had called him, and then he was ruined, he was finished, he was forgotten. For what place was there for eloquence outside the pulpit? What future was there in a Christian country for a man who had denied his Redeemer? In the 'eighties people were more strict than they were in this new century, which was already slipping from its foundations. A scholar outside the church then was as blind as a bat in the daylight. To be sure, he had tried his hand at other work, but that, too, had ended in failure. He could not push his own way; he could not even stand on his feet and sell dry goods. All he could do was to think, and nobody (here grandmother picked up a dropped stitch) could earn a livelihood in America by thinking the wrong thoughts. Then, when they had come to their last crust (for a year there had not been a scrap of meat in the house except bacon for gravy), they had called in Dr. Updike to see Ada, who coughed as if she had croup, and he had stumbled, by chance or benign curiosity, into the bare storeroom. They had the doctor (a better friend never lived) to thank for the school in the parlour. At first the people in Ironside had protested, but at last they had remembered her; they had reminded themselves of all they owed to their Fincastle ministers, from John, the pioneer, down to Adam, her husband. A closed memory, unfolded as a fan in her thoughts. She saw the pale red loop of the road round the manse on a spring morning, the narrow valley, deep as a river, and the Endless Mountains thronging under the April blue of the sky. More than fifty years ago, but it seemed only yesterday! From the changeless past and the slow accretion of time, the day and the scene emerged into the firelight . . . from the falling leaves . . . and the sifting dust . . . and the cobwebs . . . and the mildew. . . .

Suddenly, without warning, descended upon her a sleep that was not sleep as yet. Her eyes saw; her ears heard; and in her stiff fingers the needles did not slacken. But she was immersed in profound stillness; she rested upon an immovable rock. And about her she could feel the pulse of the manse beating with that secret life which was as near to her as the life in her womb. All the generations which had been a part, and yet not a part, of that secret life. The solid roof overhead, the solid floor underfoot, the fears of the night without, the flames and the shadows of flames within, the murmurs that had no voices, the creepings that had no shape, were all mingled now. Weaving in and out of her body and soul, knitting her into the past as she knitted life into stockings, moved the familiar rhythms and pauses now--of the house; and moved as a casual wave, as barely a minute's ebbing and flow, in the timeless surge of predestination.

'Grandmother's nodding. She's dropped off. She's beginning to snore,' Ada whispered triumphantly. 'Maybe . . . oh, maybe she will forget about prayers. Father,'--she turned to pluck his sleeve--'Father, doesn't God ever get tired of just listening?'

V

No man who has to provide for a family, John Fincastle thought, has a right to search after truth. Perhaps not anywhere in the world. Certainly not in America. But were the Renaissance and the nineteenth century in Europe the only ages when men believed that they could discover truth as they discovered a gold mine? When men believed that the search alone was worthy of sacrifice? Missionaries, Mary Evelyn declared, sacrificed their families all the time, but his mother insisted there was a difference when people were sacrificed to a truth that had been revealed.

Well, there might be. He didn't know. He couldn't pretend to care. That, he supposed, was what religious education had done for him--only his mother thought it was the British Museum. It had condemned him to poverty and isolation while it denied him the faith that makes poverty and isolation supportable. Not that he had been unhappy. Working over his book was sufficient happiness for one lifetime, if only he could have taken care of those who depended upon him.

Deep within his consciousness, so deep that the wish had never floated to the surface of thought, there was a buried regret for the solitary ways of the heart. In London, as a student, when he had lived in Bloomsbury on next to nothing, he had felt this freedom, he had been content to drift. He was on fire then for knowledge. He had believed that, if only he knew enough, he might defend the doctrine of his church, he might even justify God. This, he saw now, bending over with his gaze on the fire, was the first mistake of his youth. Knowledge does not justify God. All the learning in the British Museum does not prove that man can apprehend God; it proves only that men have invented gods. A multitude of gods, and all to be reconciled, one with another, before they could be vindicated. He had turned then to translating Plotinus, and while he pondered the Enneads he had been happy. Happy, yet a failure. For he had been born with an otherworldliness of the mind. He had never felt at peace except when he had strained toward something beyond life.

A year later, when he had returned from his studies abroad (he had held a scholarship for six months in Germany; he had spent two years in London), any place the church had to offer would have been open to him. But he had wanted a charge among the dispossessed of the earth; he had preferred the independence of spirit that comes from not owning things. His world, he knew, was not, and could never become, the world of facts; he was, and would always remain, out of touch with what men call realities.

During a brief visit to Queenborough he had received a call from the largest Presbyterian church in that city. There had been no question in his mind of acceptance. Then the next day, a day in June, while the letter was still unanswered ('Having good hopes that your ministrations in the Gospel will be profitable . . .'), he had met Mary Evelyn; and in an instant, or so it seemed to him, his past and future had been divided by the clean thrust of a blade. Even now, after fourteen years, this was a secret spot in his memory. Was it strength? Was it weakness? Mary Evelyn had never suspected that the meeting with her had swept away his vocation. Ada believed that he was the pastor of his church in Queenborough when he had fallen in love with her mother. But that first glimpse of Mary Evelyn had brought ecstasy, and the touch of ecstasy had released the desire for a home and children and close human ties. For a moment Mary Evelyn returned to him. Not the woman who sat within reach of his hand, frail and worn and used up by living, but a girl who was tender and radiant, with eyes like smothered flames under black lashes.

Well, he had loved her. No woman, only his seeking mind, had ever divided them. He would have given all he was for her, but he could not give what he was not; he could not make himself over; he could not prevent that involuntary recoil now and then, as if his whole existence were overgrown and smothered by the natures of women. Even the wincing of his nerves while her voice ran on, strained, bright, monotonous, inexpressibly sweet, was beyond his control.

It was true that the external world and all the part of his life that people called 'real life'--his affections, his daily activities, teaching the young, hoeing the garden, cutting logs, picking up sticks (he must remember to tell Ada that the poet Wordsworth picked up sticks for firewood)--all the outward aspects of living seemed to him fragmentary, unreal, and fugitive. He had not willed this; he had struggled against the sense of exile that divided him from the thought of his time, from his dearest, his nearest. Nevertheless, it was there. His inner life alone, the secret life of the soul, was vital and intimate and secure.

He could remember the year, the month, the day, the hour, the very minute even, when the outline of his system had come to him. In the church in Queenborough he had been a success; Mary Evelyn was happy and more beautiful than she had ever been; they had two little sons, the eldest only three. For a few weeks he had come back to visit his mother, and he was planning to write his work on God as Idea, a history of religious thought through the ages. It was a morning in April. There was a changeable sky and new life on the earth. He had been reading philosophy (was it Schopenhauer? was it Spinoza?), and when he closed the book he had turned and looked over the valley to the companionable mountains. In the very act of turning in his chair he had seen that sudden light on reality, that reconciliation between the will and the intellect.

For years the idea had lain buried. Yet in those years all he was, and thought, and felt had gathered to the bare outline and clustered over it as barnacles cling to the sides of a sunken ship. But when he began the Introduction to his history, the idea came again to the surface and he found that it was not dead but alive. In the end he had been driven into obscurity, into poverty, into the strange kind of happiness that comes to the martyr and the drunkard. Why? Why? Who could answer? He might have been false to himself, and who would have suffered? But he had craved truth (yet who knows what is truth?) as another man might crave a drink or a drug. Was this endless seeking an inheritance from the past? Was it a survival of the westward thrust of the pioneer?

He had a sudden vision of his grandmother, the one who had been Margaret Graham, with her young blue eyes and nimbus of snow-white hair. Even in her old age she had not lost a certain legendary glamour. Women were not supposed to be students in those days, yet he had never seen her kneading dough without an open book on the table beside her. With much difficulty, no doubt, she had gained a fair knowledge of history and languages. After her marriage she had still kept up her studies, and when her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight and left her with three sons, she had prepared them for college. They had made their mark, too, not one but had done honour to her and her training. How, he wondered, had she been able to overcome all those obstacles? Strong, of course, she had been in mind and body, but what he remembered most vividly was the impression she gave of invincible poise. He had heard his father say that she would have felt at home in any epoch, in any circle.

He had never forgotten, though he couldn't have been more than ten, that several of the elders in the church had surprised her one September morning before breakfast when she was walking barefooted in the wet grass on the lawn (somebody had told her that the Indians considered dew a cure for swollen feet), and she had received them without a word of excuse, and invited them, with her grand air, into the house. Yet she had cherished the queerest jumble of superstitions. Though she was scholarly for her sex, she was not above calling in old Aunt Jerusalem (Aunt Abigail's mother, and a step nearer the savage) when she wished a mole or a wart conjured away. Until they put her to bed for the last time, she had warded off rheumatism by carrying an Irish potato in her pocket. But these beliefs were more absurd nowadays than they had appeared in that credulous era. Would the time ever come when all superstitions, even those about God, would seem as ignorant as his grandmother's faith in an Irish potato?

The muscles in his leg twitched, and he glanced at Mary Evelyn, who smiled and said something in a whisper when she saw he was looking at her. His mother thought he had not noticed the change in Mary Evelyn, but she was mistaken. There were moments when he would have believed anything, acted any part, if only he could have saved her.

VI

'I've forgotten something,' Mary Evelyn said under her breath, 'but I can't think what it is.' If she didn't remind herself Saturday night, she would be sure to neglect it on Monday. There was the rent in John's greatcoat; there was the turpentine liniment for Aunt Abigail; there was Ada's best dress to be washed and prettiest hair ribbon to be pressed for the festival--Oh, the new doll's dress! That was what she was trying to think of! Sunday always made a breach in her work; but perhaps she might steal into the closet when they came back from church and look for the pink gingham she had put away, though, to save her life, she couldn't remember where she had put it. It was dreadful the way she forgot things. Her memory was growing worse all the time. Her bringing up was to blame, said Mother Fincastle, who was upwards of seventy and never forgot anything . . . If that mouse scratched under the wainscoting, she was sure she should scream, and then Mother Fincastle would make Meggie or John set a trap. She didn't mind stepping on spiders, but she couldn't bear to kill things that squeaked.

Flightiness was her infirmity, Mary Evelyn mused, folding her worn hands in her lap, and trying to restrain the impulse to jump up and sweep the hearth clear of the wood embers that had just broken and scattered. Little things filled her thoughts. They rattled about in her mind, like dried seeds in a pod. Important facts would slip away, but her whole inner world was cluttered up with the sweepings of yesterday--mere straws in the wind. It wasn't that she hadn't struggled to be sober and steady. Nobody knew how ashamed she felt just now when Mother Fincastle spoke reverently of her husband, John's father, who had been dead thirteen years. Mary Evelyn had the sincerest respect for his memory. He was a man of God, an earnest Christian, a great preacher, a true father to the poor and the afflicted. All his life he had laboured in the field at Ironside, and he had built up his church here and founded the mission on Thunder Mountain. He was all this, Mary Evelyn knew. Yet, whenever she heard his name, the first thing she thought about him was that he chewed tobacco. His godliness ought to have obliterated that recollection. But her mind wouldn't record in the right way. No matter how long she lived she would remember that Father Fincastle chewed tobacco. And she would think, 'How dreadful to be the wife of a man who chewed tobacco!'

It was like this, too, in the present. She was burdened by the litter of trifles. Her appetite was so fastidious that the sight of a bleeding rabbit or a mouse in a trap would take it away. Mother Fincastle said all that was mere silliness. She had the robust relish of the pioneer, and she couldn't understand how one could be sickened and made to turn away from food when one was hungry--or at least empty, for Mary Evelyn could never feel hungry for corn bread and bacon. Well, love was a great power when it could make everything else seem so trivial to her that she could wear rough clothes and eat coarse fare without a regret.

But there were other trials, too, so small that she was ashamed of them. Those black bristles in the mole in Mother Fincastle's eyebrow! For twelve years, ever since John had brought her to live in the manse, she had worried over those bristles. If only somebody would do something about them! Again and again, she had opened her mouth to speak of them and had shut it quickly, deterred by the austere dignity in the old woman's demeanour. It was safe, she knew, to venture just so far, but no farther, with Mother Fincastle, who commanded respect and disapproved of familiarities. Not even little Ada would have dared to speak or think of her as 'Granny'. Still the bristles were preying on Mary Evelyn's mind, which had become, she felt, more and more flighty. It's such a trivial thing, she told herself now, but I shall never bring myself to the point of speaking about it. For Mother Fincastle had been more than a mother to her; she had been a fortress of strength.

The evening was very long. John was too tired to read. She had never seen him more exhausted by a day's trip. That mortgage was wearing him out. If only they had a little money. Not much, just enough to keep out of debt. When she thought of the power of money to ruin lives a dull resentment against life, against society, against religion, awoke in her heart. For there was no sorrow greater than living day and night, in sickness and in health, in the shadow of poverty, watching that shadow spread darker and deeper over everything that one loved. There was no sorrow greater, yet there was something, she told herself, greater than sorrow.

Turning her head on the back of the chair, she looked out into the night, where the shutter flapped at the side window and the wind had risen in gusts. Outside, in the troubled darkness, she heard the creaking of boughs, the rustle of dead leaves on the ground, the small tongues of wind lapping the walls under the ivy. Inside (she touched Horace with the tip of her shoe, for he had growled in his sleep) there was the glowing centre of life. She had much to be thankful for. Nobody was ill; nobody was hungry; nobody she loved was out in the cold. Aunt Abigail had a good fire, and Horace (she glanced down at his black and tan head) was warm on the hearth.

But I must keep Ada happy, she thought the next minute. I must keep her as happy as I have been. For it was true. Looked at from any angle, she had been happy. Life had been eager, piercing in flashes of ecstasy, tragic at times beyond belief, but never drab, never tedious; never, not even at its worst, when John was standing his trial, had it been ugly.

VII

It's blowing up colder, Meggie thought, as she picked up her hooked needle and returned to the counterpane she was crocheting. I'm glad John mended that leak in the roof. Half of her mind was still in the next room, where she had turned down her own and her mother's bed, started a fire to undress by, and hung two outing nightgowns and two red flannel wrappers on a small clothes-horse in front of the flames. The woodhouse had been well filled in the summer, and with the help of chips and sticks the back logs ought to last until the winter was over. While John was away she had had the place tidied up and the paths swept with a brush broom by old Beadnell Geddy, who would work for a cast-off flannel shirt or a worn-out pair of shoes. She must remember to tell John, who would never notice the loss, that she had given the old man a pair of woollen stockings because he suffered from chilblains.

Though she had little patience with John's religious doubts (hadn't he gone out of his way to borrow trouble when he put unsound views into his book?) she could not deny that he was unselfish in little things and ready to help her with any work that she wanted done. And she could never forget (nobody who saw it could ever forget) the way he had nursed his wife when she had pneumonia six years ago. He had never left her bedside, even to change his clothes, until the crisis was over, and then he had fallen asleep from exhaustion with his hand on her pillow. Mother had covered him with a blanket and had left him there, with his knee on the floor, until he awoke.

While she watched him Meggie had felt her heart soften. She still loved him; he was her brother and a Fincastle, and she prided herself upon the strength of the family ties. But she could not forgive the headstrong will that had affronted his father's memory (who should know more of truth than their father, who had been a servant of God?) and broken his mother's heart. 'Would you have him live a lie?' Mary Evelyn had asked passionately. But why should he set up his own belief for the truth? Who was John that he should know more of truth than his forefathers had known or the Bible had revealed to them?

Bending over the counterpane, she reached down into the big splint basket near the hearth and tossed a knot of resinous pine on the fire. She loved to watch the coloured flames shoot up quickly, branch out from the stalk, and unfold into flowers. Another pale spider (how she hated spiders!) was lowering itself on a cobweb from the top log on the woodpile. That was the pile they kept there in case of a snowstorm. She must make Uncle Beadnell move the logs on Monday and look for the spiders. A mouse, too, had been worrying mother in the night, and she must remember before she went to bed to bait a trap with middling rind in case Ada had eaten the last crumbs of cheese.

Mary Evelyn was as thin as a rail. Her face was all eyes, and in spite of her high colour, the skin looked waxen. She was not strong like the Fincastles. When that pain in her back stabbed suddenly, her hand would fly to her heart, and a look of terror would flash into her eyes. Yet she would work on until it killed her. Nothing could stop her. Energy had fastened upon her like a disease. John ought to speak to Dr. Updike about her. Perhaps he would suggest a tonic of bitters or some cod liver oil. Mr. Greenlee, the apothecary, would always let them have medicine and pay for it when they were able.

Years ago when Meggie was a young girl (she was only thirty-three now, but she felt older), Dr. Updike had treated her for spring fever. His figure was less burly then and there were no pouches under his eyes. He couldn't be over forty now, but he had travelled the roads at all hours in all seasons, and he looked elderly for his years. Whenever she thought of him, though it was so long ago, a pale flush seemed to spread more within than without. Not that she had had any sentiment (for her life was too full of useful activities and her heart was too full of her family), but for a little while she had wondered if--well, if he had cared more than he showed on the surface. She had never forgotten the time he kept his hand on the inside curve of her arm (she was noted for her pretty arms), stroking it softly while he sat by her bed and asked questions about her health. That was all. Yet she had felt startled and shy, with this pale glow breaking out in her mind. It was queer she should remember that after all these years, after he had married Hannah Kelso and had a family of children.

For herself, she had never thought of love-making or marriage. It wasn't that she had been plain or unattractive. She was better-looking than most, especially when she had been plump and fresh, with a neat figure. But she couldn't run after men the way some girls did even in Ironside. In the old days there had not been women enough to go round, and all had been sought after. There were belles among simple people like themselves, as well as in the more distinguished circles of the upper Valley. Mother said it had been different ever since the war, with most of the young men going away to make a livelihood and marrying in strange places. Well, she hadn't worried about that. If the Lord had appointed her to marriage, He would have arranged it all in His own good time. As it was, she had put her hope in little things, and she had been happy. She was the only member of the family who was never low-spirited, not even in the long winters, when sometimes they were snowed in for a week.

VIII

The taste of sugar is like pinks, Ada thought. It's like verbena and sweet alyssum. If only a taste wouldn't melt and fade as soon as it had gone down! And when you hadn't had sweetness for a long time (Father had waited because he could get coffee and sugar cheaper from a wholesale house over in Doncaster) it tasted different and sharper. She wished pleasant things lasted longer, and other things, like evening prayers when you were sleepy, wouldn't drag on for ever. Father wasn't going to read to-night. She wanted dreadfully to hear what happened next in Old Mortality, but mother had whispered in the kitchen that she mustn't ask him to read. If she couldn't listen to that, she wished they would let her shut her eyes tight till morning.

Mother had promised to get up early on Monday (Sunday always came when you'd rather it wouldn't) and cut out the dress and bonnet for the new doll before breakfast. Nellie had never had a pink dress. She had never even had a sunbonnet. Maybe, after a long time, she might get used to Flora and begin to love her.

Nights were always short, except Christmas Eve, which was longer than anything. She hoped it would be snowy this Christmas. Aunt Meggie said it was blowing up cold. If there was a deep snow, Ralph McBride was going to make a big snow man, the biggest they had ever had, in their yard. But if there wasn't any snow, he had promised to take her for a climb to the top of Lost Turkey Hill. She had never been more than half way up when she was picking huckleberries, but this time they would start early, with some bread and meat in their pockets, and climb to the very top. Then they could look down into the gap between Thunder Mountain and Old Man Mountain.

Oh, she wished Christmas would hurry up! Mrs. Tiller, who kept a cake and candy store down in the village, had sent grandmother some raisins and currants and citron for a fruit cake. Aunt Meggie was trying to save enough sugar and butter, pinch by pinch. Nobody was going to have any sugar until Christmas, except Ada, because mother said children couldn't be expected to do without sweets. Children and old people, she had said, handing the sugar bowl to grandmother. But grandmother had replied that she wasn't old enough yet to be childish. 'Wait until I'm a hundred, my dear. Don't hurry me into my dotage.'

Last Christmas (it seemed miles away!) had been splendid. Ralph had given her the doll's bedstead, and she had had a good package of fire-crackers for him. They had gone out together, and he had set off the fire-crackers, only not all at a time. He had shown her how to light one and let it go off a little and then stamp it out, so it would last longer. She had another package for him this year. His mother had to give him only useful presents, like shirts and stockings, and things to keep him warm when he hadn't a greatcoat. Grandmother had knitted a thick jersey for him, like the one she gave father. He wore it over a flannel shirt, under his thin coat, and he said the cold never really got to him.

Ralph was the brightest boy in school, though grandmother insisted he was too headstrong. Already he was saving money to go to college, and he worked part of the day in Mr. Rowan's machine shop. In summer he and his mother lived on the vegetables they raised in their back yard. Ralph was a fine gardener, too, but no matter how hard he worked he could never put by enough, father said, to take him to college. A gifted boy, though, might find some other way, and father was teaching him everything that he could. Ralph was going to be a lawyer when he grew up. Though he was only twelve, he knew already what he wanted to be, and he read everything he could find about law and lawyers. He would make up all kinds of games with a trial in them, and a judge and a jury. Ada would be the prisoner on trial for her life. She didn't know why, but that was the part she could act best. Janet would want to be the judge, but he wouldn't let her. He didn't like Janet. She fibbed, he said, and was a telltale. Blue eyes and yellow curls didn't make her any better to play with. She trotted after them wherever they went, and she was always begging him to make her a doll's bedstead.

There was that white spider again. Did spiders have ghosts? Did they have skeletons? Did they have hearts? She must remember to ask father when he woke up. But Ralph might know better than father about things like spiders. There was a mouse, too, that crept out when it thought they were all asleep. She wondered if Aunt Meggie had caught it in her trap. Mother hated to hear them squeak when they were caught. But grandmother didn't mind any more than Aunt Meggie. She said the Lord had made mice to be caught in traps. 'Why?' Ada had asked, but nobody had answered. Only when she had asked a second time, mother had replied sharply, 'Your father must tell you'. Then she had asked over again, 'Why, Father?' and he had answered slowly, 'God alone knows why, my child'. Father and mother worried over such questions. Why God does this? Why God does that? What is the reason for everything? But grandmother and Aunt Meggie knew straight off, without any thinking. Grandmother said she answered questions 'out of conviction'.

The wind was blowing loud and rough. She could hear it crashing through the trees, as if it were bringing snow. Lots of sticks would be shaken down. They would have to lie there till Monday, because nobody ever did any work, except cooking and making fires, on Sunday. Picking up sticks didn't look like work, but even if 'twas only useful play, that also was profaning the Sabbath. Wind made mother feel jumpy, she said, and she didn't like the tap-tap-tapping of the ivy on the window-pane. 'I hope Aunt Abigail has plenty of cover,' she would say. Or, 'Have the sheep sense enough to go into that shelter?' Or, 'Are you sure none of the chickens were shut out, Meggie?' It did seem dreadful that their sheep had so little sense. They were old sheep, and Job, the pet ram, was almost as rheumatic as grandmother. When Ada was little they had had more. One of the first things she could remember was going into the kitchen one morning in the midst of a spring blizzard and seeing a new lamb, wrapped in grandmother's red flannel underbody, lying on an old feather bed in front of the stove, while Aunt Meggie fed it from a rag dipped in a mixture of milk and water and a little sugar. That was the sort of recollection, she felt, that stayed with you till you grew up.

She was glad she didn't have to live out in winter, like a bird or a sheep or a wild animal. She wondered if the small furry creatures in the woods could snuggle down under the dead leaves at night and keep the cold wind from nipping them. The wind was the worst. It sounded then as if it had blown off a bough. She hoped the wind would spare their oldest oak, 'the pioneer', even if it damaged the younger trees. So many bird and squirrel families would be made homeless if the storm stripped the pioneer. When you looked up in the branches you could see nests sprinkled like houses in a village, and in spring and summer the tree hummed all the time, mother said, as if 'twere a harp in a breeze. Last year, when Aunt Meggie raised three turkeys (though one of them was mistaken for a wild turkey and shot by a hunter, who took it away with him) they would never roost anywhere but on that low-hanging bough near the gate . . . Toby Waters must be frightened, out by Murderer's Grave. You'd think the hovel and the pigsty would be swept down into the gully, with all the pigs squealing. Grandmother said the church helped Mrs. Waters because, though she was a bad woman, Toby was not to blame for being an idiot.

Well, she was glad, too, that she wasn't an idiot. But why did God make idiots? It seemed worse than making mice to be caught in traps. When she had tried to find an answer to that, grandmother had replied tartly, 'If you ask any more foolish questions, Ada, I shall be tempted to box your ears'. And father had said over again, 'God alone knows why, my child'. But, whatever God's reason might be, it was a mercy that they lived almost in the village and not, like the Waterses, in a pigsty on the rim of a gully. They couldn't be too thankful, mother kept saying, though she must know that she had said it before, for a warm room and a good fire and plenty to eat. The words had a singing sound that Ada enjoyed, and they reminded her that the taste of sweetness was still somewhere far down inside her. 'Twas nice, too, to feel Horace's head, as soft as velvet, resting on her foot and keeping it cosy. If the evening didn't stop soon, she was going to slip down on the rug and let Horace be her pillow and sink away, away, while the flames crooned and the kettle sang and the shadows danced and the spider swung to and fro on his cobweb.

Suddenly father was saying, 'It's almost time for bed. Shall I read a page, Ada?'

'Oh, if you would, Father!' She raised her head from the softness of Horace and sprang to her feet. 'I want dreadfully to know if they caught Morton.'

The leaves fluttered as John Fincastle opened the book. Well, every day had an end. He glanced at his mother's face, furrowed into an expression of grim goodness, at Meggie's cheerful features, which were still comely, at the drooping head of his wife, transfigured by the firelight into its old loveliness. A sigh passed his lips, but his voice when he began reading was strong and thrilling.

'"Hist," he said, "I hear a distant noise."

'"It is the rushing of the brook over pebbles," said one.

'"It is the sough of the wind among the bracken," said another.

'"It is the galloping of horse," said Morton to himself, his sense of hearing rendered acute by the dreadful situation in which he stood. "God grant they may come as my deliverers!"'

The pages rustled as they turned, and the book was closed. 'He's safe, my dear, until Monday. I'll let Horace out for a minute, and then we'll lock up and have prayers.' Every night Horace ran as far as the gate before he went to sleep in the front hall on the sofa with the sagging bottom. The chamber door was left open, and sometimes Ada would be awakened by the nose of the hound on her cheek. 'He's had a bad dream,' she would think. 'I reckon dogs have bad dreams just like other people.'

To-night, after she had said her prayers and slipped into her trundle-bed and drawn the blanket up to her chin, she dropped to sleep saying, 'It is the sough of the wind among the bracken'. Those were glorious words to have in your head; they seemed to go round by themselves. At midnight, when she awoke suddenly, they were still turning. Outside, the wind was blowing harder than ever. Could the last leaves hold on until morning? Underneath the crashing and the whistling she could hear the murmur of the dying flames in the fireplace, and then the sudden squeak of the mouse in Aunt Meggie's trap. She hoped Aunt Abigail knew when she said mice didn't mind being caught. Perhaps her Indian blood made her wise in such matters. Well, anyway, Flora wouldn't have heard about that. Rising softly, she picked up the new doll from beside Nellie, who was used to sleeping alone, and brought it to bed with her. Grandmother thought it was only silliness to pretend that things like trees and dolls had real feelings. But they may have, she thought; you never can tell.