“When the month was past and Singin' Sandy's day rolled round again for the ninth time, it was spring time, and the river was bankfull from the spring rise and yellow as paint with mud and full of drift and brush. Out from shore a piece, in the current, floating snags were going down, thick as harrow teeth, all pointing the same way like big black fish going to spawn. Early that morning, the river had bitten out a chunk of crumbly clay bank and took a cabin in along with it, and there was a hard job saving a couple of women and a whole shoal of young ones. For the time being that made everybody forget about Singin' Sandy being due, and so nobody, I think, saw him coming. I know I didn't see him at all until he stood on the river bank humming to himself. “He stood there on the bank swelling himself out and humming his little song louder and clearer than ever he had before--and fifty yards out from shore in a dugout that belonged to somebody else, was Bully Harve Allen, fighting the current and dodging the drift logs as he paddled straight for the other side that was two miles and better away. He never looked back once; but Singin' Sandy stood and watched him until he was no more than a moving spot on the face of those angry, roily waters. Singin' Sandy lived out his life and died here--he's got grandchildren scattered all over this county now, but from that day forth Harve Allen never showed his face in this country.” Cap'n Jasper got up slowly, and shook himself, as a sign that his story was finished, and the others rose, shuffling stiffly. It was getting late--time to be getting home. The services in the darky church had ended and we could hear the unseen worshippers trooping by, still chanting snatches of their revival tunes. “Well, boys, that's all there is to tell of that tale,” said Cap'n Jasper, “all that I now remember anyhow. And now what would you say it was that made Harve Allen run away from the man he'd already licked eight times hand running. Would you call it cowardice?” It was Squire Buckley, the non committal, who made answer. “Well,” said Squire Buckley slowly, “p'raps I would--and then agin, on the other hand, p'raps I wouldn't.” X. BLACK AND WHITE OVER night, it almost seems, a town will undergo radical and startling changes. The transition covers a period of years really, but to those who have lived in the midst of it, the realization comes sometimes with the abruptness of a physical shock; while the returning prodigal finds himself lost amongst surroundings which by rights should wear shapes as familiar as the back of his own hand. It is as though an elderly person of settled habits and a confirmed manner of life had suddenly fared forth in new and amazing apparel--as though he had swapped his crutch for a niblick and his clay pipe for a gold tipped cigarette.