Then he walked away to where the two children stood, some distance from the path. The minister followed the coffin to the grave, but the School-teacher went with the two children through the meadow to the spot of green between the two hickories. He sat down there in the deep clover, the children beside him. Below came the sound of the earth on the coffin, and the high-pitched nervous voice of the minister. The School-teacher talked with the children. After a while a shadow fell across the grass. The minister was standing beside them. He had come up from the filled grave and the carpet of the meadow had hidden the sound of his approach. He spoke to the School-teacher. “Do you think that you are old enough to teach the children the fear of God?” “I shall not teach them the fear of God.” “Then I don't see how you are going to give them any Christian instruction.” The man sitting among the deep clover blossoms, looked up at the minister's face. “Isn't there something growing over your eye?” he said. CHAPTER VI |THE School-teacher came out of the door of Nicholas Parks' house. It was early in the morning. Frost glistened on the rails of the worm fence. The air was crisp and sweet. There was a smell of faint wood smoke. The door of the house was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside from which a black leather string, tied in a knot, issuing from a worn hole, hung on the outside of the door. The man drew the door close and, pulling the string, dropped the latch into place. Then he left the house, walking slowly. In the direction that he moved there was no path. He crossed the little meadow, south of the house, climbed the rail fence and entered the forest. There was still no path, although the man moved like one who followed land marks that he knew. He descended through the forest for perhaps half a mile in the deep leaves. Then he came abruptly on a path that entered a little cove and continued around a shoulder of the mountain. A spring of water issuing here from a limestone strata trickled into a keg buried in the earth. On the broken branch of a dogwood sapling, beside the spring, hung a mottled gourd. The School-teacher stopped, dipped the gourd into the crystal water, and drank. At this moment three figures came into view along the path from the opposite direction: a child about two years old, a woman, and a rough-haired yellow dog. The child came first. He walked with the uncertain tottering gait of very little children. He wore a clean, white, muslin dress, a tiny apron and cheap baby shoes, such as one sees hanging on a string over the counter of mountain stores. He was a sturdy little boy, with soft yellow hair, burnished at the tips like that of the School-teacher, and big gray-blue eyes. He was laughing, stopping now and then to look back at the dog following, and his mother; and then running along ahead.