“Le' me take it, Aunt Cornely,” whispered Huldy, loosing the light-wood from the elder woman's hand and leaving her free. And the next moment Sammy's left hand was clasped tight in his mother's; he turned his face round to her broad breast and hid it there; and there he sobbed and shook as the savage jaws came slowly back. * * * * * That strange hour worked a complete revolution in the lives of the little family in the cabin on The Bench and those in the big, hospitable Pap Overholt home. Sammy had “met up with” punishment at last; he had encountered discipline; and the change it wrought upon him was almost beyond belief. The spell which this winning, wayward, perverse creature had laid upon Pap Overholt's too affectionate, too indulgent nature was dissolved in that terrible hour. He was no more to the father now than a troublesome boy who had been most trying and not very satisfactory. The ability to wring the hearts of those who wished to benefit him had passed from Sammy; but it is only fair to say that the wish to do so seemed to be no longer his. While his arm was still in a sling, before he had yet raised his shamed eyes to meet the eyes of those about him, Pap Overholt cheerfully put old Ned and Jerry to the big ox-wagon and bodily removed the little household from The Bench to the home which had been so long yearning for them. Now, at last, he was Pap Overholt indeed. The little Huldy, whose burden of gratitude for two had seemed to Aunt Cornelia so grievous a one, was a daughter after any man's heart, and her brood of smiling children were a wagon-load which Pap John hauled with joy and pride to and from the settlement, to the circus--ay, every circus that ever showed its head within a day's drive of Little Turkey Track,--to meetin', to grove quarterlies, in response to every call of neighborliness, or of mere amusement. In the Piny Woods BY MRS. B. F. MAYHEW A sparsely settled bit of country in the piny woods of North Carolina. A house rather larger than its neighbors, though only a “story and a jump” of four rooms, two upper and two lower, and quite a commodius shed on the back containing two rooms and a small entry; and when Jeems Henry Tyler increased his rooms as his family grew, his neighbors “allowed” that “arter er while he'd make er hotel out'n it.” Several out-houses stood at convenient distances from the house. A rough board paling enclosed the yard. A clearing of twenty-five or more acres lay around three sides of the house, and well-to-do Industry and Thrift plainly went hand in hand about the place.