Alethea stood motionless for some little time, still leaning on the fence. A stalk of golden-rod, brown and withered, its glory departed, touched the rails now and then. Its slight, infrequent swaying was the only intimation of wind, except that the encompassing smoke, filling the vast spaces between heaven and earth, shifted occasionally, the dense convolutions silently merging into new combinations of ill-defined shapes,—colorless phantasmagoria, dimly looming. It might have seemed as if all the world had faded out, leaving only these blurred suggestions of unrecognized forms, like the vestiges of forgotten æons. Even the harvesters did not maintain always a human aspect. Through the haze they were grotesque, distorted, gigantic; their hands vaguely visible, now lifted, now falling, in their deliberate but ceaseless work. They looked like vagrants from that eccentric populace of dreams, given over to abnormal, inconsequent gestures, to shifting similitudes, to preposterous conditions and facile metamorphoses of identity. Alethea felt a strange doubt, in recognizing Sam Marvin, whether it were indeed the moonshiner whom she saw. An insistent silence possessed the air, broken only by the rustle of the crisp husks as the three dim figures pulled the corn. Suddenly there sounded a mad, scuttling rush, shrill canine yelps, and a series of nimble shadows vaulted over the fence. The coon ran up a tree, while the moonshiner’s dogs ranged themselves beneath it, with upturned heads askew, and gloating, baffled eyes, and moans of melancholy frustration, punctuated ever and anon with yaps of more poignant realization of the coon’s inaccessibility. Tige, irresolute, showed fight at first to the strangers; then he too sat down, and with quivering fore-paws and wagging tail wheezed and yelped at his fireside companion, as if he had no personal acquaintance with the raccoon, had held with him no relations of enforced amity, and could not wait one moment to crunch his bones. The half-grown girl, desisting from her work, turned her head in the direction of the noise, and caught a glimpse of Alethea. She had an excited eye, high cheek-bones, and a thin, prominent nose. Her face looked peculiarly sharp inside her flabby sun-bonnet. She was at the “growing age,” and her frock was consequently short for the bare, sun-embrowned legs which protruded from it. Her bare feet were long and bony. She seemed to be growing lengthwise only, for her shoulders were narrow, her arms slim. She had a callow, half-fledged look, not unlike a Shanghai pullet. Her manner was abrupt and fluttered, and her voice high and shrill. “Laws-a-massy!” she exclaimed, jumping precipitately backward on her long, attenuated legs, “yander’s Lethe Sayles!” Both the man and the woman started violently,—not because of the matter of the disclosure, but of its manner, as was manifested in his rebuke.