“Listen at ye now! The headin' young folks o' this kentry 'll never rest till they make thar elders shoulder _all_ the burdens. An' what air ye wantin' a pore ole 'oman like me ter talk about?” Evelina hesitated a moment, then looked up, with a face radiant in the moonbeams. “Tell all 'bout Abs'lom--afore I ever seen him.” His mother laughed. “Ye air a powerful fool, Eveliny.” The girl laughed a little, too. “I dunno ez I want ter be no wiser,” she said. But one was his wife, and the other was his mother, and as they talked of him daily and long, the bond between them was complete. ***** “I hev got 'em both plumb fooled,” the handsome Absalom boasted at the settlement, when the gossips wondered once more, as they had often done, that there should be such unity of interest between old Joel Quimbey's daughter and old Josiah Kittredge's widow. As time went on many rumors of great peace on the mountain-side came to the father's ears, and he grew more testy daily as he grew visibly older. These rumors multiplied with the discovery that they were as wormwood and gall to him. Not that he wished his daughter to be unhappy, but the joy which was his grief and humiliation was needlessly flaunted into his face; the idlers about the county town had invariably a new budget of details, being supplied, somewhat maliciously, it must be confessed, by the Kittredges themselves. The ceremony of planting one foot on the neck of the vanquished was in their minds one of the essential concomitants of victory. The bold Absalom, not thoroughly known to either of the women who adored him, was ingenious in expedients, and had applied the knowledge gleaned from his wife's reminiscences of her home, her father, and her brothers to more accurately aim his darts. Sometimes old Quimbey would fairly flee the town, and betake himself in a towering rage to his deserted hearth, to brood futilely over the ashes, and devise impotent schemes of vengeance.