By pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how long I “stayed in”; and Coretta’s opinions always echoed the hearth voice of the clan. But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them paling off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was “bad off.” Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta wanted to borrow such or such an article for breakfast. It was always something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a broken day. For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her borrowing the day before. “Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me my mornings.” She would promise; then it would happen again--the violent waking, with its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me. “But I didn’t know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an’ we couldn’t eat biscuits ’thout salt in ’em.” Or, “That man come after supper to see about sellin’ the cow, an’ we talked so late I clean forgot we didn’t have a speck o’ coffee for breakfast.” Or, “I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an’ there was the box plumb empty.” Or, “Uncle Rann got in last night. We didn’t have a dust o’ flour, an’ I couldn’t set him down to pone-bread an’ him come all the way from Madison to see us.” Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight exasperation over my failure to get her point of view. “But Sam _had_ to git to the ploughin’ early, an’ you only had to jest set an’ write!”