The girl went unsteadily and stood clinging to the table, her red-rimmed eyes half closed against the piercing gold of the evening sun, and then stretched her hands toward the bowl. The mother cried, “Take heed--it is hot!” And the girl hesitated and began to blow her little shallow breaths upon the food to cool it. But the mother continued to gaze upon her, still troubled as she gazed, and she muttered to herself, “When he takes that next load of rice straw to the city I will ask him to go to a medicine shop and buy some balm for sore eyes.” Now the boy was complaining because she had not set his bowl down on the table, too, and so she went and fetched it and set it down and for a time there was silence. Then the mother felt herself too weary for a while even to eat and she gave a great sigh and went and fetched the little bamboo stool and set it by the door and sat down to rest. She drew in her breath deeply and smoothed back her rough sun-browned hair with her two hands and looked about her. The low hills that circled about this valley where their land lay grew slowly black against a pale yellow sky, and in the heart of this valley, in the small hamlet, fires were lit for the evening meal and smoke began to rise languidly into the still windless air. The mother watched it and was filled with content. Of the six or seven houses which made up the hamlet there was not one, she thought suddenly, in which the mother did better for her children than did she for hers. Some there were who were richer; that wife of the innkeeper, doubtless, had some silver and to spare, for she wore two silver rings upon her hands and rings in her ears such as the young mother used to long for in her girlhood and never had. Well, even so, she had liefer see her own spare silver go into the good flesh the children wore upon their bones. The gossip said the innkeeper gave his children but the meats the guests left in their bowls. But the mother gave her own children good rice that they grew upon their land, and if the girl’s eyes were well there would be nothing wrong with them at all; sound and well grown were they, and the boy big enough for seven or eight. Yes, she had sound children always, and if that one had not come too soon, and died when it had breathed but once, it would have been a fair boy by now, too, and trying to walk soon. She sighed again. Well, here was this new one coming in a month or two, and it was enough to think about. But she was glad. Yes, she was glad and best content when she was big with child and when she was full with life.... Someone came out of the door across the street of the little hamlet, and out of the smoking doorway she could see her husband’s cousin’s wife, and she called, “Ah, you are cooking, too! I am but just finished!” “Yes--yes--” came the other’s voice, carelessly cheerful. “And I was just saying, I dare swear you are finished, you are so forward with your work.”