“Ef she jes’ could hev got the vally o’ the stock ’thout the bother an’ contrariousness o’ hevin’ Teck in the house, wouldn’t she hev been happy!” Strobe silently jeered. They sat around the open door, after the meal was concluded. The high air was chill; the influence of the stern wilds, with the lonely moon upon them, with the silent mists vagrant in the valleys, was vaguely drear, but the red flare of the smouldering fire within was genial to see, and harmonized with the sense of home. A’minty sat upon the doorstep, with the yellow cat in her arms; it was wakeful, eying the moonlight, and now and then the flickering gossamer wing of a cicada’s short flight in a few hop vines at one side of the porch. The old dog lay at length and drowsed; but a puppy found an absorbing interest in a toad hopping along the road, and now sat and gazed at him with knitted brows and an intent attitude, and now smote him with a festive paw and treated him to a high callow yap. How the leaves of the oak accorded with the moonlight; how they lent their glossy surface to the sheen! The shadows flecked the road with dusky intervals and interfulgent glitter, and the great crag that jutted out a little way down the slope was half in the gloom and half in the light. Mrs. Bowles’s needles clicked, as she knitted, and gleamed in the red glow of the fire. “Miss me enny in the Cove, cousin Eli?” she demanded, flashing her bead-like eyes upon him. Strobe thrust his hands deep in his pockets, swayed himself far back in his chair, and surveyed her with a sort of burly jocosity. “Waal, _I_ ain’t missed ye none,” he averred. He looked steadily at her, as if to watch the effect of this statement, and she, apprehending a jest, returned his gaze expectantly. “I ’lowed ez Peter Bryce war competent ter miss ye about all the missin’ ez ye war entitled ter. Ho! ho! I reckon he ’lows ez Bowles air ez lucky ez a wishbone.” And Benjamin Bowles, feeling somehow thrust out of the conversation at his own fireside, so that he could think of nothing to say, made haste to glibly laugh too, to show his triumph in his prize; for Peter Bryce was the rejected suitor. Mrs. Bowles looked quickly at her husband, as if to supervise the due exhibition of gratulation; then laughed coquettishly, with a great show of teeth. “Oh, nobody expec’s _ye_ ter take ter jokin’! Ye air so sober-sided, cousin Eli.” She dropped a stitch, and bent forward to catch the light of the flames upon it. She drew back with a sharp cry. “Who put that thar stick o’ ellum wood on the fire ter burn? Who’s burnin’ ellum?” she exclaimed, pointing at it. “’Tain’t ellum, air it?” Her husband bent over in quick anxiety to see. “Ellum!” said cousin Eli laconically. “I seen it ez soon ez I kem in.” “It air a sign o’ bad luck!” she protested, at once flustered and angry.