“Yo’ ma say”—his eyes were fixed upon Abner—“ef yo’ don’ come home, she gwine come after yo’—an’ cut yo’ into inch pieces wid a rawhide when she git yo’. Dat jest what Miss Hortense say.” As though such a book as _Hints and Helps_ had never existed, Abner shot for the gate—he was but a hobbledehoy fascinated with the idea of playing gentleman. But in Ross there were the makings of a man. For a few half-hearted paces, under the first impulse of horror, he followed his deserting chief, the laughter of the family, the unrestrainable guffaws of the negroes, sounding in the rear. But when Champe’s high, offensive giggle, topping all the others, insulted his ears, he stopped dead, wheeled, and ran to the porch faster than he had fled from it. White as paper, shaking with inexpressible rage, he caught and kissed the tittering girl, violently, noisily, before them all. The negroes fled—they dared not trust their feelings; even Alicia sniggered unobtrusively; Grandfather Claiborne chuckled, and Aunt Missouri frankly collapsed into her rocking-chair, bubbling with mirth, crying out: “Good for you, Ross! Seems you did know how to call on the girls, after all.” But Ross, paying no attention, walked swiftly toward the gate. He had served his novitiate. He would never be afraid again. With cheerful alacrity he dodged the stones flung after him with friendly, erratic aim by the girl upon whom, yesterday afternoon, he had come to make a social call. FOOTNOTES: [26] From _Harper’s Magazine_, August, 1906. Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. Republished by the author’s permission. HOW THE WIDOW WON THE DEACON[27] By William James Lampton ( -1917) Of course the Widow Stimson never tried to win Deacon Hawkins, nor any other man, for that matter. A widow doesn’t have to try to win a man; she wins without trying. Still, the Widow Stimson sometimes wondered why the deacon was so blind as not to see how her fine farm adjoining his equally fine place on the outskirts of the town might not be brought under one management with mutual benefit to both parties at interest. Which one that management might become was a matter of future detail. The widow knew how to run a farm successfully, and a large farm is not much more difficult to run than one of half the size. She had also had one husband, and knew something more than running a farm successfully. Of all of which the deacon was perfectly well aware, and still he had not been moved by the merging spirit of the age to propose consolidation. This interesting situation was up for discussion at the Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Sisters’ Sewing Society. “For my part,” Sister Susan Spicer, wife of the Methodist minister, remarked as she took another tuck in a fourteen-year-old girl’s skirt for a ten-year-old—“for my part, I can’t see why Deacon Hawkins and Kate Stimson don’t see the error of their ways and depart from them.”