The feat a woman’s imagination can accomplish in a given time is the most triumphant illustration of the agility of the human mind. Before either spoke again Mrs. Purvine had elaborated every detail of the courtship and engagement, pausing from time to time, as she placed the dishes on the table, and looking about the room in complete abstraction, planning how to arrange the furniture to give space for the dancing at the infair. “Set out the supper in the shed-room, an’ take these hyar two beds an’ thar steads up-steers inter the roof-room,” she muttered, measuring with her eye. “The loom kin jes’ be h’isted out ’n the shed-room inter the yard—an’ I don’t keer ef I never see it agin—an’ the spinning-wheels set in the bedroom.” As to Satan, she had forgotten that he was quite capable of making himself small enough to hide in the fiddle. The light was growing dull out of doors; the stridulous voices of the September insects sounded ceaselessly, scarcely impinging upon the sense of quiet, so monotonous was the iteration of their song. The strokes of an axe, betokening activity at the wood-pile, seemed to cleave the silence, and reverberated from the mountains, as if the echoes were keeping a tally. Alethea had rolled up the quilting frame, and it swung from the beams. Presently the children were trooping in, three great awkward boys, who evidently formed themselves upon Jerry Price’s manner, except the youngest, a lad of fourteen, whose face had a certain infantile lower, saved over from his juvenile days, and concentrating readily into a pout. Even his mother admitted that he was “sp’iled some.” Together they made short work of the egg-bread and “br’iled bacon.” They tarried not long afterward, but trooped noisily up the ladder to the roof-room; and as they strode about on the floor, which was also the ceiling of the room below, it seemed momently that they would certainly come through. Jerry lighted his pipe and sat on the doorstep; the fashionable Mrs. Purvine lighted hers and took a chair near. All the doors stood open, for the night was sultry. The stars were very bright in the moonless sky. The dogs lolling their tongues, sat on the porch, or lay in the dewy grass; making incursions now and then into the room, climbing cavalierly over Jerry’s superfluity of long legs, and nosing about among the ashes to make sure that none of the scraps had escaped. “Don’t ye know I never waste nuthin’, ye grisly gluttons?” demanded Mrs. Purvine, the model housekeeper. But their fat sides did not confirm this statement, and, bating a wag of homage in the extreme tip of their tails, they paid no attention to her.