“Starved for lack of food, and society, and excitement,” Mr. Carson added. “Their stomachs and their minds and hearts are empty.” “Yes, sir, just plumb empty.” “Well, let’s put something in them. What do you say, Mr. McBirney?” “It certainly would be a fine thing to do, sir. Now, how’ll you go about it?” “Well, we want you and Mrs. McBirney to co-operate with us. We want you to take charge of the chair factory that we mean to start, and we want Mrs. McBirney to preside over the weaving.” “And leave the farm, sir?” cried Mary McBirney. “You’re not ever meaning that, are you?” “Why, would that be so hard? We’d put you up just the sort of cottage you want, you know. And you’d be near the school, so that Jim could go without using up the best part of his energy racing up and down the mountain.” “I reckon Jimmy does get rather wore out,” Mary McBirney mused. “And maybe it would be better all ’round, Mr. Carson. And yet—” Mary McBirney’s eyes strayed off to the purple valley with its silver streams; they rested on the low-lying cottage, wreathed in its flowering vines and hemmed around with its rose bushes, its sweet althea shrubs, its hydrangeas and bridal wreaths; they rested on the Pride of India tree and the graves beneath; on the towering tulip trees under which they sat, and she shook her head. “No, Mr. Carson,” she said gently and with the moisture gathering in her eyes, “we couldn’t never make another place so—so sweet—as this here one. We couldn’t put our hearts into another place as we have into this. Besides, though I thank you kindly, sir, I wouldn’t want to leave my home to work outside. My job is making things bright for Thomas and Jim and Azalea, and perhaps for Hi, here. If it was so that I really needed to work outside, of course I would and never say a word. But I’d rather we got along with little, and went patched and mended, than for us to have more and lose the feeling of home.” “I can’t say the farm has paid any too well,” Thomas McBirney said, “Sometimes it certainly has been hard scratching. And yet, somehow, I wouldn’t like to cut loose from it. It’s such a likely prospect we have here.” He too was looking off at the valley. “Somehow it don’t seem as if we could move on. Perhaps the mountains _have_ cast a spell over us, as you say.” “Well, I can’t blame you if they have,” said Mr. Carson cordially. “Yet ought you to let sentiment like that stand in the way of Jim’s schooling and your advancement?” Thomas McBirney crossed one leg over the other, and looked down pensively at his calloused hands. “I don’t know as I had ought to,” he said slowly. “But after all, we’re happy here. The children was born here. Our little girl—Molly, you know, that’s dead—she seems to be running over the place still. Seems like I can feel her near me, plenty of times. Don’t you feel that way, ma?” Mary McBirney nodded, with her tender smile.