It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side--"too po' to sprout cow-peas," as his old wife would always add--"but hits pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry time comes we can take keer ourselves." Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work: "Hit's nature's remedy," she would add--"wuck and five draps o' turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly." She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion. Her tongue was frightful--her temper worse. Her mission on earth--aside from work--work--work--was to see that too much peace and good will did not abide long in the same place. Elder Butts, the Hard-Shell preacher, used to say: "She can go to the full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the preacher that married him, then I'm wrong." But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of her than to remark that she was "a female Jineral--that's what Tabitha is." Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had starved long ago. "Furagin' is her strong point"--he would always add--"she'd made Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary." And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch. "Now, if anybody'll study Nature," she would say, "they'll see she never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions--an' I don't want to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea--that's fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an' water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'--when I was a gal I cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day."