Up and down the long corn rows Pap Overholt guided the old mule and the small, rickety, inefficient plough, whose low handles bowed his tall, broad shoulders beneath the mild heat of a mountain June sun. As he went--ever with a furtive eye upon the cabin--he muttered to himself, shaking his head: “Say I sha'n' do hit. Say he don't want me a-ploughin' his co'n. My law! Whut you gwine do? Thar's them chillen--thar's Huldy. They got to be fed--they 'bleeged to have meat and bread. Ef I don't--” Again he lifted his apprehensive glance toward the cabin; and this time it encountered a figure stepping from the low doorway--a young fellow with an olive face, delicately cut features, black curling hair, the sleep still lingering in his dark eyes. He approached the fence--the sorry, broken fence,--put his hands upon it, and called sharply, “Pap!” The old man released the plough-handles and came toward the youth, shrinking like a truant schoolboy called up for discipline. “Pap, this is the way you do me all the time--come an' plough in my co'n when I don't know nothin' about hit--when I don't want hit done,--tryin' to make everybody think I'm lazy and no 'count. Huldy tellin' me I ought to be ashamed of myse'f, in bed while my po' old pappy--'at hain't ploughed a row of his own for years--is a-gittin' my co'n outen the weeds.” The father stood, a chidden culprit. The boy had worked himself up to the desired point. “You jest do hit to put a shame on me. Now, Pap, you take that mule--” “W'y, Sammy,--w'y, Sammy honey, you know Pappy don't do it fer nair sech a reason. Hit don't look no sech a thing--like you was shif'less an' lazy. Hit jes look like Pappy got nothin' to do, an' love to come and give you a turn with yo' co'n; an', Sammy honey,”--the good farmer for the moment getting the better of the timid, soft-hearted parent,--“hit is might'ly in the weeds, boy. Don't you reckon I better jes--” The other began, “I tell you--” “There, there! Ne'mine, Sammy. Ef you don't want Pappy to plough no mo', Pappy jes gwine to take the plough right outen the furrow and put old Beck up. Pappy gwine--” The boy turned away, his point made, and strolled back to the cabin. The old man, murmuring a mixture of apologies, assurances, and expostulations, went pathetically about the putting up of the mule, the setting away of the plough. Nobody knew when Pap Overholt began to be so called, nor when his wife had received the affectionate title of Aunt Cornelia. It was a naming that grew of itself. Forty years ago the pair had been married--John, a sturdy, sunny-tempered young fellow of twenty-one, six feet in his stockings, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, and with a name and a nature clean of all tarnish; Cornelia Blackshears, a typical mountain girl of the best sort.