"Her husband was a very desperate character. Convicted of illicit distilling, he was sentenced to serve a term in the penitentiary, but he managed to escape and for one whole year he evaded the sheriff, hiding in the mountains. Of course his wife had to go through the agony of this long search. She told me she had never slept more than an hour at a time while her husband was in hiding. That was the one thing she was bitter over--that long hounding of her husband. She used to say if the government had spent the money and energy in educating the mountaineers that they had in hunting for them, there would have been no cause for hunting for them. Moonshining is to them a perfectly reasonable and lawful industry, and nothing but education can make them see it differently. His hiding place was finally ferreted out and he was surrounded and captured, but not before he had managed to shoot five men, killing two of them and being fatally wounded himself. "That was many years ago when Tom Tit was a little chap of three. Melissa, the mother, was wrapped up in the child. His intelligence then was keen and his love of Nature and beautiful things was so pronounced from the beginning that if this cloud had not come over his intellect he would surely have been a great artist of some kind, whether poet, painter or musician, I can't say." "Perhaps all of them, like Leonardo da Vinci!" exclaimed Lil, who always did know things. The old gentleman smiled at her appreciatively. "What is an artist but a person who finds things, just like my poor Tom Tit, and then is able to tell to the world what he has found?" "When he writes to you, does he tell you things in poetical language?" asked Lucy, her gray eyes very teary as she listened to the story of the mountain youth. "My dear, his writing is not ordinary writing. He can neither read nor write as you think of it. His letters to me are written in another way. He tells me what he has found each day with some kind of rude drawing or with some device of his own." "Please show us some of them!" begged all four of the guests. "I am going to let you guess what he meant." He took from his desk in the corner a packet of large envelopes. "I leave with my friend enough addressed and stamped envelopes to run him until I return, and all he has to do is put in his letter and seal it and drop it in the box at Bear Hollow, our post office. Sometimes he draws me a picture and sometimes he just sends me something he has found. What do you think he intended to convey by this?" On a sheet of paper were drawn many stars of various kinds and sizes, and down in the corner was what was certainly meant for an axe. "Clear night and going coon hunting, I think," said Skeeter solemnly. "No!" cried Lucy and Lil in a breath. "Those are meant for snow flakes! It has begun to snow!" "Right you are! Good girls, go up head! And how about the axe, since it is not meant to signify coon hunting?"