“He ain’t feeling nothing like you be,” declared ma. “Jim’s a boy, and matter of fact. He’s a leetle older than you, really, but not near so old in his feelings. Jim saw what there was to see on top—saw what was floating along the surface. But you think and feel in a different way, and your feelings go down deeper. Now mind, I don’t say that I think they always will. Jim’s tender and he’s true, and when men are tender and true they feel deeper than any woman can feel. At least no woman can get ahead of them that way. I’m waiting for Jim to get a little older before his feelings set, so to speak. Just now he ain’t got any more opinions than a nice soft bunny.” “Oh, ma,” cried Azalea, “you don’t really know him if you think that! Jim does a lot of thinking, and he’s as tender-hearted as he can be.” Ma McBirney blew out the candle and smiled to herself in the dark. She loved to hear her Jimmy praised. But he had seemed a little dull and backward in comparison with the girl, and in her silent jealousy for her boy, she had spoken of him in a fault-finding way. It healed her to hear him praised in that warm manner. “We’re lucky ones, Thomas,” she said when she had gone downstairs, “to have two children like them. They’re pure gold.” “So they be,” said pa. “So they be!” And then he and ma walked silently out to the Pride of India tree beneath which their Molly and Azalea’s mother were buried, and stood there a few minutes before they closed up the house for the night. The next week when pa went to town, he brought back great news. “Them there Carsons down in the Atherton house,” he said to his family at supper, “are up to the greatest things you ever heard of. They’re making all the mountain folks welcome, and buying up their pieced bedquilts and their hand-weaving, and their baskets and chairs. Why, Mr. Carson, he and me was made acquainted by the grocer, and he asked me if I done anything in the way of hand work. Well, I allowed I made pretty good chairs, and he told me to bring down half a dozen big roomy ones for his porch. He said like as not some of his friends would want some too. Then I told him about your weaving and he said he’d like to drive his wife up to see it. Said he’d like to look over our place. I’d been telling him how sightly it was. They’ve got everybody humping. Cannaby’s making roads for him, and Fletcher’s making shoes, and he’s buying up fine hens—wants some of my guinea hens—and he’s looking for a good cow, and I don’t know what all. I ain’t seen things so lively down street since I can recollect.” “If he comes up, he’ll bring Miss Carin, won’t he? Oh, ma, do you think he’ll bring Miss Carin?” “Sure he will,” said Mary McBirney. “She wouldn’t let him come up here without her if she had her way, after all the liking she took to you.” “And to Jim, ma. She liked Jim just as much as she did me.” “Go along,” said Jim, “she wouldn’t ’a’ looked at me if you hadn’t been there, Zalie.”