“It’s Sam a-burnin’ rags to oust the mosquitoes, so he kin sleep,” she explained; “they are wuss this yeer’an I ever seed ‘em. Jake an’ the gals grease the’r faces with lamp-oil when they have any, but I jest kiver up my head with a rag an’ never know they are about. I reckon we’d better go to bed. Jake has fixed him a bed up in the loft, so you kin sleep by yorese’f. He’s been jowerin? at his paw ever sence supper fer treatin’ you so bad.” The next morning, after breakfast, Jake threw a bag of shelled corn on the bare back of his old bay mare and started to mill down the valley, and his father shouldered an ax and went up on the hill to cut wood. “Whar are you gwine?” asked Mrs. King, following Laramore to the door. “I thought I would walk over to the Loften place and see the improvements. I used to hunt over that land.” “Well, be shore to git back by dinner, whatever you do. Me an’ Jane caught a hen on the roost last night, an’ I’m gwine to make you a chicken pie, kase you used to love ’em so much.” Half a mile up the road, which ran along the side of the hill, he came into view of the rich, level lands of the Loften plantation. He stood in the shade of a tall poplar and looked thoughtfully at the lush green meadows, the well-tilled fields of corn, cotton, and sorghum, and the large two-storied house with its dormer windows, tall, fluted columns, and broad verandas--at the numerous outhouses, barns, and stables, and the white-graveled drives and walks from the house to the road. Then he turned and looked back at the cabin--the home of his mother. It was hardly discernible in the gray morning mist that hung over the little vale in which it stood. He saw Jake, far away, riding along, in and out among the sassafras and sumac bushes that bordered a worn-out wheat-field, his long legs dangling at the sides of the mare. There was a bent figure in the wood-yard picking up chips; it was his mother or one of the girls. “Poor souls!” he exclaimed; “they have been in a dreary treadmill all their lives, and have never known the joy of one gratified ambition. If only I could conquer my own selfish desires I could give them comforts they never dreamed of possessing--a taste of happiness. It would take my last dollar, and Chamberlain and Gilraith would never understand. They would look elsewhere for capital and for an editor, and it would be like them to say they could get along without my contributions.” It was dusk when he returned to the cabin. Jake sat on his bag of meal in the door. Old Sam had taken off his shoes, and sat out under a persimmon tree “coolin’ off,” and yelling angrily at his wife to “hurry up supper.” When she heard that Laramore had returned she came to the door. “We didn’t know what had become of you,” she said, as she emerged from the cabin. “I got interested in the Loften farm, and before I realized it the sun was down; I am sorry.”