We kind a come to then and got up. Then I thought of the clerk havin that paper money, so I told Jobe to go and git it. He went, and the clerk told him he couldent surrender the money till the case was settled; that that money was part of the court record, and the land might not sell for enough to pay the judgment and all costs. So we come home and left our wheat money and hay money and cow money and the money for poor old Tom and all with the officers of the court. Jobe, poor man, from the time he left that court-house till now he has jist moped around, sighin and moanin. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE LITTLE WHITE ROSE-BUSH. WHEN Ike Miller brought Jobe’s paper, the _Advercate_, to us day before yisterday, the fust thing my eyes fell on was: “SHERIFF’S SALE.—Isaac Vinting, plaintiff, _vs._ Jobe Gaskins, defendant.” I tried to look away from it, but, all I could do, I couldent git my eyes off from them lines. I turned the paper over, but it jist seemed to me that I could see them words all over that paper. I never had anything make me feel so queer in all my life. My head seemed to be goin round and round, and I couldent see anything but “Sheriff Sale”—“Vinting—Gaskins—Gaskins—Vinting—Sheriff Sale.” “Sheriff Sale.” I had seen them same two words hundreds of times before, but they never looked like they did that day. I was all alone at home, and I thought I would never live to see another livin bein—I felt so queer. Well, I laid that paper down and went out in the yard. Arter a while I begin to feel better, though nothin seemed to look like it use to—nor dont to this day. When I got out in the yard I could see the trees, and bushes, and fences, and the house, and the big road, and the little stream down over the bank; but they looked so queer. Though I had lived by and among them for years, they dident look like they did when I use to think they would be around me and near me when I should die. No, they now looked like somebody else’s trees and bushes and fence and road and sich. [Illustration: Little Jane.] I felt as though I was not at my own home, but intrudin on other people’s property, “trespassin,” as them court-house lawyers calls it. That “sheriff sale” in that paper had changed the looks of things. I went over to the little white rose-bush—the bush my little Jane planted the day she was four years old—the one she had watched and called hers till she was taken from me two years arter. I thought, as I stood there by that little bush, planted by her little hands, that I could nearly see her little form a squattin down and her little dimpled fingers pattin the dirt around the roots of that little bush. I remembered how she plucked the first rose and come a runnin to me with it, sayin: “Mamma, mamma, my bush raised this. How pritty!” [Illustration: “I COULD NEARLY SEE HER LITTLE DIMPLED FINGERS PATTIN THE AIRTH AROUND THE ROOTS OF THAT LITTLE BUSH.”]