As he steps into Captain Lumsden's yard that Autumn afternoon, he is such a man as one likes to see: quite six feet high, well made, broad, but not too broad, about the shoulders, with legs whose litheness indicate the reserve force of muscle and nerve coiled away somewhere for an emergency. His walk is direct, elastic, unflagging; he is like his horse, a clean stepper; there is neither slouchiness, timidity, nor craftiness in his gait. The legs are as much a test of character as the face, and in both one can read resolute eagerness. His forehead is high rather than broad, his blue eye and curly hair, and a certain sweetness and dignity in his smile, are from his Scotch-Irish mother. His picturesque coon-skin cap gives him the look of a hunter. The homespun "hunting shirt" hangs outside his buckskin breeches, and these terminate below inside his rawhide boots. The great yellow dog, Watch, knows him well enough by this time, but, like a policeman on duty, Watch is quite unwilling to seem to neglect his function; and so he bristles up a little, meets Morton at the gate, and snuffs at his cowhide boots with an air of surly vigilance. The young man hails him with a friendly "Hello, Watch!" and the old fellow smooths his back hair a little, and gives his clumsy bobbed tail three solemn little wags of recognition, comical enough if Goodwin were only in a mood to observe. Morton hears the hum of the spinning-wheel in the old cabin portion of the building, used for a kitchen and loom-room. The monotonous rise and fall of the wheel's tune, now buzzing gently, then louder and louder till its whirr could be heard a furlong, then slacking, then stopping abruptly, then rising to a new climax--this cadenced hum, as he hears it, is made rhythmical by the tread of feet that run back across the room after each climax of sound. He knows the quick, elastic step; he turns away from the straight-ahead entrance to the house, and passes round to the kitchen door. It is Patty, as he thought, and, as his shadow falls in at the door, she is in the very act of urging the wheel to it highest impetus; she whirls it till it roars, and at the same time nods merrily at Morton over the top of it; then she trips back across the room, drawing the yarn with her left hand, which she holds stretched out; when the impulse is somewhat spent, and the yarn sufficiently twisted, Patty catches the wheel, winds the yarn upon the spindle, and turns to the door. She changes her spinning stick to the left hand, and extends her right with a genial "Howdy, Morton? killed some turkeys, I see." "Yes, one for you and one for mother." "For me? much obliged! come in and take a chair." "No, this'll do," and Morton sat upon the doorsill, doffing his coon-skin cap, and wiping his forehead with his red handkerchief. "Go on with your spinning, Patty, I like to see you spin." "Well, I will. I mean to spin two dozen cuts to-day. I've been at it since five o'clock."