I looked over the table at the Scotch scones, the poached eggs, the funny little cuts of butter, miniature loaves of it pressed and decorated. "I see you’ve got the same bill of fare, Marget," I said. "Well," she answered, falling again into English, "we are two old people set in our ways, and it seems to suit us." "Noo, if you’d only told us you were coming," said Tammas, trying to speak ironically, "I’d ’a had some o’ thae auld things ye’re sae fond o’, Jackie, such as sliced Indian turnips like ye got up in the lodge of the rocks on the hill yon day," and he laughed as he recalled the burning my lips got from the raw turnip. I laughed. "Tammas, it must not go back to Aunt Lucretia that I ate my first breakfast with you." "It’s a mile to the hoose," said Marget, "an it’s only sax o’clock, sae there’s a graun’ excuse for ye to eat anither breakfast, when ye gang back." She smiled with that funny little smile I had known of old when she wanted one to know that she was meaning the opposite, but was too Scotch to express it. "Weel, we winna say onything about it," said Tammas. "Jackie, lad, if ye’ve got onything like ye’re auld appetite, ye’ll be ready for anither at the hoose when ye get back. Dae ye mind hoo ye used to dae that when ye were jist oor wee laddie, running aboot the dairy an’ dipping your fingers on the sly in oor cream pots?" So I let him launch into his favorite subject, the cows, and the wonderful record they had made since I left. Of Gladys Gaily, who had made her pound of butter from less than five pounds of milk. "Aye, lad, ’tis the ould Top Sawyer bluid that’s doing it," he said proudly. And that I would find it all in the last "Butter Tests of Jersey Cows." Several of my old friends had died and one—"Ou, but it hurts me sadly, my boy, to tell it—Gladys Gaily, herself, has passed with that milk fever. Aye, but it takes only the rich ones." *CHAPTER VIII* *THE STONE-CROP* I remember that April day when I first saw the stone-crop in bloom. Across the valley from the dairy is the blue grass pasture of the cows; and on a hillside studded with dwarf cedars, Nature’s first efforts to cover up her nakedness after man’s ax has passed, runs a streak of bare, brown limestone, winding across the hills an acre wide. Above it the grass and cedars grew down to the bare rocks, and then they stopped short, for no soil was there. Years before, pioneer men, fighting, unthinking, world-conquering, with the primal instinct of the Aryan _wander-lust_ in their blood, had stripped that spot of earth of its clothing, leaving the naked ground beneath, lifeless and bare. In all the beautiful blue grass pasture this was the one scar: on this green shield of Nature, the one rent. The birds, which love the deep shade of the cedars, stopped at its borders and flew back from the strip of brown desert.