After breakfast in the morning, Nucky invited me to go for a walk. We ascended one of the spurs of the mountain in the rear of the house,--never have I seen a more beautiful site for a home than in that hollow--and a third of the way up, on a small "bench," came upon what appeared to be a play-village. Beneath spreading trees, were a dozen or more diminutive houses, with latticed sides and roofs of riven oak boards. Some were crumbling into decay, some new and substantial. The one to which Nucky led me was still yellow. "Here's where Maw lays," he said, almost in a whisper (I judge that one reason he finds it so hard to speak of her is his feeling that he, or rather, her desire for his education, was in a way the cause of her death), and I knew that this must be the family burying-ground, and these the grave-houses once so necessary for the protection of the dead from wild beasts, and still surviving here in the customs of the mountain country. Near the grave-house of his mother were three smaller ones, still good and new. "Our three young uns betwixt Blant and me died of typhoid one summer, about five year' gone," Nucky explained. China-asters were blossoming gaily among the weeds about these grave-houses. "Maw she sot 'em there," Nucky said, "she liked to come here and rest a spell when she was hoeing corn, and set with these young uns." The tragedy of the life of Nucky's mother was brought forcibly before me as I stood there. An eager-minded, loving-hearted woman, shut off from all opportunity, the bringer of ten new lives into the world, laboring and drudging as only these mountain women know how to for the sustenance and clothing of her family, suffering constant anxiety as to the very lives of her loved ones by reason of the family "war," and finally having to go out into the darkness of death and bid them all farewell,--surely it is a sad and tragic history. As we turned away, Nucky added, "With them three young uns around her, I allow she haint so lonesome as she would be all by herself." "No," I said, "having her loved ones with her, she is happier far, even in heaven. For it is that which makes heaven." Blant had dinner for us at eleven, and soon afterward we were ready to depart. "Come over and see us sometime at the school," I called to Blant, as he stood with the babe on his arm by the gate. He thanked me gravely, but did not say he would come. "Gee," said Nucky, as we rode on, "he can't never do that,--why they'd just _have_ to arrest him if he run into the jaws of the sheriff and the jail that way!" We made the last hour or two of our journey through moonlight in which the mist-hung mountains and shadowed valleys lay entrancingly lovely. "This is the kind of nights I allus keep watch for the Cheevers," said Nucky. I wondered if these were the sole thoughts aroused in him by the wondrous beauty in which he had been born and bred. Presently I knew.