Stella scolded them sharply on the night when they had fought the Harlan Avenue white boys. "Let them Lilydale niggers fool wid white trash, ef dey wants to. De Judsons is quality, don't you fergit; you let dat white trash be. Fight wid you' own kind. Ef a white man gin you any trouble, you let Marster Judson fix 'im." The lesson sank in. They were quality negroes, lords of the mountain domain. Stocky Jim was the champion rough-and-tumble fighter of the Zion Church. "Ah kin lick any three Neboes wid mah toes an' teeth," he would boast in religious snobbery. Tom had had one of Mr. Judson's shotguns, to warn off marauders; the care of this descended to Ed, as the oldest, and the boys took turns in potting rabbits, flickers, and an occasional partridge, with shells borrowed from the big house. First choice of the game went to the Judson table; but there was enough left to fill out the scanty Cole menu of corn-pone, sow-belly, molasses, and a seasonal mess of greens. The boys practiced hurling outcrop boulders at the big-trunked oaks until they could skin the bark four times out of five at fifty feet. The outdoor life, the clearing work, the continual "toting" of water from the icy spring in balanced buckets, toughened them into exuberant manhood. They did not marry, although Stella constantly scolded the older pair for "hangin' 'roun' dem Avenoo C skirts"; and their wider rambles added grass-ripened watermelons and plump chickens to the fare. Diana, alone of the family, found life on the mountain bleakly unhappy. She possessed a frightened, dusky beauty. Adolescence had changed her from a gawky immaturity to a lush roundness, large-lipped and full-figured, and yet with the well moulded face and the soft brown texture of skin that are occasionally found in a mixture of blood. From some Aryan ancestor she had inherited features the reverse of negroid; and she revealed nothing of the unpleasant pertness often developed in the twilight realm where black and white intermingle. The liberating touch of education had been just potent enough to dissatisfy her with the old, and too weak to furnish a self-sufficient substitute. The world of books she had begun to explore at Tuskegee; there was no one in the family group who could go with her in the talk or the dreamings that this led to. The haphazard home life, the thick enunciation, worse at meal times, these were the things she had begun to get away from; she could not reconcile herself to the old slough of "nigger" life.