Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 51579-h.htm or 51579-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/51579/51579-h/51579-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/51579/51579-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/daughterofmornin00galerich A DAUGHTER OF THE MORNING [Illustration: Cosma] A DAUGHTER OF THE MORNING by ZONA GALE Author of Friendship Village, When I Was a Little Girl Neighborhood Stories, etc. Illustrated by W. B. King Indianapolis The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers Copyright 1917 The Bobbs-Merrill Company Press of Braunworth & Co. Book Manufacturers Brooklyn, N. Y. A Daughter of the Morning CHAPTER I I found this paper on the cellar shelf. It come around the boys' new overalls. When I was cutting it up in sheets with the butcher knife on the kitchen table, Ma come in, and she says: "What you doin' _now_?" The way she says "now" made me feel like I've felt before--mad and ready to fly. So I says it right out, that I'd meant to keep a secret. I says: "I'm makin' me a book." "Book!" she says. "For the receipts you know?" she says, and laughed like she knows how. I hate cooking, and she knows it. I went on tying it up. "Be writing a book next, I s'pose," says Ma, and laughed again. "It ain't that kind of a book," I says. "This is just to keep track." "Well, you'd best be doing something useful," says Ma. "Go out and pull up some radishes for your Pa's supper." I went on tying up the sheets, though, with pink string that come around Pa's patent medicine. When it was done I run my hand over the page, and I liked the feeling on my hand. Then I saw Ma coming up the back steps with the radishes. I was going to say something, because I hadn't gone to get them, but she says: "Nobody ever tries to save me a foot of travelin' around." And then I didn't care whether I said it or not. So I kept still. She washed off the radishes, bending over the sink that's in too low. She'd wet the front of her skirt with some suds of something she'd washed out, and her cuffs was wet, and her hair was coming down. "It's rack around from morning till night," she says, "doing for folks that don't care about anything so's they get their stomachs filled." "You might talk," I says, "if you was Mis' Keddie Bingy." "Why? Has anything more happened to her?" Ma asked. "Nothing new," I says. "Keddie was drinking all over the house last night. I heard him singing and swearing--and once I heard her scream." "He'll kill her yet," says Ma. "And then she'll be through with it. I'm so tired to-night I wisht I was dead. All day long I've been at it--floors to mop, dinner to get, water to lug." "Quit going on about it, Ma," I says. "You're a pretty one to talk to me like that," says Ma.