presence. The woman sat with her arms folded, her eyes on the fire, pondering deeply. A young man came to the back door, glanced in, and turned away. When the woman fixed her grave, wide, prominent eyes upon Harshaw, there was something in their expression so unnerving that his refuge seemed hardly more comfortable than the savage wilderness without. But he said bluffly to himself that he had not stumped Kildeer and Cherokee for nothing; he rallied his traditions as a politician. Surely, he reflected, he who could so beguile other men’s adherents to vote for him could win his way to a simple woman’s friendship, if he tried. He looked at the child and smiled, and said that the boy was “mighty peart.” He dropped into the vernacular as a conscious concession to the habits of the “plain people.” The woman’s fierce face was transfigured. “That’s a true word, stranger,” she said, beamingly. “An’ Philetus ain’t three year old yit, air he, Sereny?” The girl in an abrupt, piping way confirmed the marvel, and Harshaw looked again at Philetus, who had no sort of hesitancy in seeking to take off the spurs and convert them to his own use. His mother went on: “Philetus, though, ain’t nigh so pretty ez three others I hed ez died. Yes, sir, we-uns lived up higher than this, on a mounting over yander thar.” “You haven’t been living here long?” said Harshaw, merely by way of making talk. The woman instantly resumed her stony, impassive manner. “’Tain’t long nor short by some folkses’ medjure,” she said equivocally. She looked watchfully at him from time to time. An old gray cat that sat on the warm stones in the corner of the hearth, purring, and feigning to lift now one of her fore-paws and then the other, eyed him with a round, yellow, somnolent stare, as if she too had a charge to keep him under surveillance. She got up suddenly, arching her back, to affectionately rub against the great booted feet of the idiot, who came and leaned on the chimney and gazed solemnly at the stranger. He was overgrown and overfat, and had a big, puffy, important face and a cavalier, arrogant manner. “Don’ wanter,” he said, in his thick, mouthing utterance, as the woman, once more seeming flustered and anxious, told him to take the basket and go out to the wood pile and fill it with chips. The whir of the spinning-wheel was suddenly silent, and the girl, who officiated as a sort of echo of her mother’s words, a reflection of her actions, came and emptied the basket of the few bits of bark within it, and handed it to him. “G’ way, Sereny,” he said good-naturedly, but declining the duty.