“Lonie will help you, and the boys. Len will plough and harrow all the good land you want for gardens and patches. We’ll put in a fall garden too, and have all kinds of green things through the winter--spinach, lettuce, collards, turnip-tops, celery--besides the keepers, parsnips, carrots, salsify, sweet potatoes put up in sand--_and_ beans!” I rushed on, with plans undigested but dazzling, and her few tears dried in shining twinkles. “I’ll try,” she said, “if you’ll keep right after me.” I smiled too, and she started home. “I wonder where that gray hen is by now,” she turned to say. “Ef you’d seen her when that duck-diddly yeeped, you’d be laffin’ yet.” II Serena tried. Her lifelong acceptance of things as they happened had kept her unaware of the complexities of an occupation made up of a jumble of industries, as farm life must ever be until the ferment of organization begins to heave effectively in the mind of the last individual, the man on the land. But she was favored by nature with a good brain, and began to be pleased when she found that it would work. A neighbor made a dress for Lonie and the product was so hopeless a bungle that Serena, perforce, had to attempt remaking it. With no help from me except the initial urge, a trifle imperious, perhaps, she got at it, and the result was so charming that I asked in surprise why she had taken it to Mrs. Hite. “I didn’t feel like foolin’ with it.” “But you see you did have to fool with it. And you had to wash for Mrs. Hite in exchange for the sewing.” “Washin’s easy if I’m feelin’ good. It kinder bothers my head cuttin’ an’ sewin’. But Lonie is takin’ on so about that dress, I reckon I’ll have to mess with her clo’s from now on.” “No, teach her to make them herself.” “Lord-a-mercy, she’ll have to pick it up like I did. Don’t you git to pushin’ me, Mis’ Dolly, an’ maybe I’ll make it through like you want me to.” She had the same success with the boys’ shirts. They had been accustomed to one sleazy shirt for Sundays and rags for work-days. Now, released from the commercially constant grays and drab blues of the cheaper ready-mades, they could, for the same money, buy material for two and have the thrill of selecting from an assortment of specks and stripes and colors of their heart. One Sunday when Len and Serena halted by my doorstep on their way to “preachin’ over the ridge,” I noticed that Len was uplifted by a modest lavender stripe. “I’ve been wearin’ them ol’ dingy shirts to meetin’ fer twenty years, an’, Lord, I’m sick of ’em,” he said, with a proud eye on Serena, the worker of miracles.