From time to time, during the rich and dewy morning hours, when the bees droned about the blooming clover in the orchard aisles, and the birds were abroad in the highways of the skies, Marcella parted the sheltering vines on the porch, that she might look forth unobserved upon the voters gradually assembling at the polls. She knew many of them by sight, and was informed concerning their disposition toward her father’s pretensions; and thus her heart weighed heavily or grew buoyant, as enemies or friends were in the majority. They came chiefly on horseback, and there were rows of saddle-horses hitched to the rack before the wide door of the forge, and to the boughs of trees hard by, and even to the badly chinked logs of the building itself; sometimes they dully drowsed, sometimes impatiently pawed, sometimes fell to bickering together, and necessitated the interposition of their masters to readjust their status. Many of the farmers had come in ox-wagons. The teams had been unyoked, and were leisurely munching the feed, spread out in the dappling shadows upon the ground before them. Casting a vote, the inalienable right of an American citizen, seemed a lengthy and serious matter, and was not to be lightly discharged; during the main portion of the day it busied the denizens of the surrounding slopes, and thus deliberately they saved the country. The assemblage presented, therefore, something of the aspect of an exclusively masculine picnic, for such women and children as had been permitted to gratify a long-cherished hankering to “view” the populous Settle_mint_ had hied them decorously to the houses of various relatives,—the tender ties of consanguinity thus utilized on this auspicious occasion,—and were seen no more during the day. Old friends met, and smoked, and talked at great length. The state of crops in various localities elicited anxious inquiries; old gossip that had been on its last legs suddenly developed a new and brisk pair of limbs, and circulated like a fresh scandal. Parson Donnard could not have failed to hear his name excitedly coupled with that of the devil, as he threaded his way through the crowd; but mindful of his vision, he placed no false nor sensitive interpretation upon this association, and there was an elongation of his thin compressed lips which in an ungodly man one might have thought singularly like a smile of flattered vanity. The heavy jeans-clad mountaineers reverently made way for him, and there was a perceptible abatement of the guffaws and slowly drawled jokes as he passed. But as in more cultured communities, the observance and the feeling were not always in close compatibility, and the criticism he encountered was as if he were of this world.