Her face was an eager flower, but what I saw was a glimpse of mediæval gates opening on time’s mossy twilights. Was it possible to pass through with Coretta, and look at the world with the eyes of a vanished age? Hitherto she had turned to me for scant crumbs of wisdom. Now she was aquiver with the reversal of our rôles. “I’ve been afraid to tell you about sech things,” she said. “Some people jest laf at ’em. I been so sorry for you sometimes, doin’ things I knew were bad, an’ I dasen’t tell you.” “What things, dear?” “Oh, like sowin’ that sage in the garden. You shore have trouble if you sow sage. You have to get the bunches an’ set ’em out, or else get some strange woman ’at’s passin’ to sow it for you.” “But isn’t that unfair to her?” “No; she loses the trouble as soon as she crosses water. She’d only have to cross the branch by the spring an’ it ’ud be gone.” That was the beginning of my subversion, which was soon alarmingly complete. If I had given Coretta crumbs, she now spread me a banquet. Her store of folk-wisdom fell upon me in showers that sometimes took my breath. Many of her rituals were too complex for memory here to set down, but she had scores of briefer ones, such as her cure for a dog’s tendency to vagabondage. With an auger greased with ’coon-oil made from a ’coon _the dog had caught_, you bore a hole in the gate-post. Then cut off a bit of the dog’s tail and fasten it in the hole; but do not let him see you. If he runs away after that, you can be sure he was peekin’ from somewheres. She invited me to be present when granpap cured his mule of the swinney. Part one: we poured cold water on the mule’s shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint-rock until it smoked. Part two: carefully directed by Coretta, we laid the rock back where we had found it, same side up, “an’ pineblank the same way.” And we did indeed cure the mule. But her remedy for fever was perhaps the gem of her store. You take fodder that has never been wet, grasp all you can in your hand, cut it squarely off above your hand, and squarely off below. Of the remainder left in your grasp make a tea. This tea is an unfailing cure for any kind of fever. “Why didn’t you make it for Sam last year, Coretta?” I asked. “We didn’t have any fodder that hadn’t been rained on. That’s the trouble with that cure. You can’t git fodder that hasn’t been wet. Every year I say I’ll cure a bit in the dry, but I always forgit about it till it’s too late.” She was as learned in signs as in cures. “There,” she might say, “it’s goin’ to rain, an’ I’d laid out to wash to-morrow!” “But the sky is clear, and there’s no wind from the west.” “Didn’t you hear that rooster crow when he was gettin’ up into the cedar? If a rooster crows as he goes to his tree, his head’ll be wet ’fore he comes down. But maybe,” she reflected, casting no doubt on the oracle, “it’ll clear by sun-up, an’ I can wash anyhow.”