Her brother kept dipping a long spoon into the kettle she stirred, and dropping the liquid into a tin cup of cold sugar-water. As long as the hot stuff twined about in ropy arms, it was syrup; but as soon as it settled to the bottom in a clear mass, it was wax, and the change from wax to the grain of sugar is a sudden one. When Eck Davis announced, “It’s waxed,” the kettle was slung off in haste, and everybody left the tree which had propped his back, or the robe on which he had leaned, and the graining sugar was served in saucers and handed around. It could be eaten with spoons or “worked” into crackling ropes. Davis’s boys took off the syrup kettles and covered them up in the bark lodge. They would be emptied into stone jars when the more important business of entertaining company was over. The fire now shone redder. Jane was cutting up pies and cakes in the bark house, all this warm light focused on her lowered eyelids, when more of her suitors arrived. “I knowed the entire posse would be out,” said Philip Welchammer in a laughing undertone to the girls sitting beside him. “Davises never misses invitin’ anybody.” “You’re too late, Jimmy Thompson,” called Jane’s elder brother before he noticed the preacher was in the party. “Your sheer’s e’t.” When, however, Dr. Miller from Lancaster also came forward, John stood up stiffly and put on his company grandeur. He held the town-man in some awe, and was bound to be constrained by the preacher. Jimmy Thompson, having met Jane with awkward heartiness, said he would make the young folks acquainted with Brother Gurley. They all knew Brother Gurley; but Jimmy was a wild young man, and his audacity in “brother”-ing the preacher was more delicious than home-made sugar. He afterward explained that the preacher had been turned onto the old folks for Sunday, and he asked him along to the frolic without suspicionin’ he’d come, but the preacher, he took a-holt as if that was the understandin’. Jane met Brother Gurley and Dr. Miller with equal ease. A hush fell upon the company, and they ate and watched her serve the newcomers and appear to balance such formidable individuals in her hands. Affectation was in that region the deadliest sin a girl could commit against her own popularity, and Jane’s manner was always beautifully simple.