Half a mile below him a patriarchal ox was plodding slowly up the mountain road. The ox was old. His red hair was worn away in a variety of places, by long labors at the sled and the plow. His ancient horns were capped with brass knobs. Astride the ox sat a small boy on a sack of corn, perhaps a bushel and a half shelled from the cob. Under the sack was a strip of homemade carpet dyed yellow with copperas. The little boy guided the ox with a piece of old rope tied to the left horn below the brass knob, precisely as the driver of a four-horse team directs it with a single line. When he wished the ox to go to the right, he jerked the rope and shouted, “Gee, Berry,” when to the left, he pulled on the rope and shouted, “Haw, Berry.” But the ox no longer required these elaborate directions. “Gee,” “Haw,” accompanied by a kicking of the rider's naked heels, were enough for the patriarch, or the soft heels alone on the broad iron ribs. The boy could not have been above six years old. He wore two garments, a little blue shirt of the material called “hickory,” and short trousers, with tiny hand-knitted woolen “galluses.” He was now engaged with an extreme difficulty. For more than a mile, under the ox's rolling gait, the corn had been moving over to one end of the sack. To keep the bag from falling, the boy had added his weight to the decreasing end. As the corn moved, he shifted his seat a little farther out on the sack. He sat now, well over the ox's side on the very end of the sack. His little mouth was contracted. It had been a long, painful struggle--this fight against the corn. Every inch, every fraction of an inch, contested. The grains had crept slowly over, and the child had considered and estimated the change, and moved with it. He had attributed to the corn a certain malicious intent, a certain insidious hostility, and he had resisted with dogged courage. It was all in the set of his little mouth, in the clutch of his tiny brown hand. For the sack to fall was a calamity which the child well understood. He could not lift the sack. He could not leave the ox and go for aid, because Berry, although a member of the family, was an eyeservant and not above making his dinner on the corn when the master's back was turned. Neither could he leave the corn lying in the road and return with the ox. Some one might carry it away and, besides, it was his bale of stuffs, the cargo with which he had been intrusted, and he could not leave it. The mountain road was deserted and the evening sun was beginning to descend. The child's whole energies were centered on his desperate struggle with the corn, and the ox traveled on leisurely as he liked. Presently, as he neared the top, the ox stepped on the root of a tree remaining in the road, and his shoulder went down. The sack slipped forward and fell, carrying with it the boy and the piece of carpet.