“What’s that?” said John, and they both paused to listen. It was a sound of crashing and scampering, of smothered exclamation and the rasping and tearing of garments. Dick Hanks was whipping his steed through the woods, against trees, logs, and branches, as if George’s Chapel graveyard, containing the ghastly vault of his father, and George’s Chapel preacher, waving Jane Davis in one victorious hand, were both in merciless pursuit of him. SWEETNESS TIME, 1855 Amber light in the dense Ohio woods receded slowly from the path which a woman ascended. The earth was frozen, and glazed puddles stood in cow tracks. But this woman loved to climb from the valley farms and her day’s sewing, of chill December evenings, and feel that she approached her heaven and left the world behind. The year had just passed its shortest day. Neighborhood custom allowed her to leave her tasks early in the evening, because she came to them with a lantern in the morning. She hastened as you may have noticed a large-eyed anxious cow cantering toward its nursling; but stopped to breathe, half ashamed of herself, in sight of a log-house known through the Rocky Fork settlement as Coon’s. All the Coons had been queer little people, but this last daughter of them exceeded her forefathers in squatty squareness of stature and Japanese cast of feature. As she was quite thirty-five her friends called her an old maid, according to the custom of that remote period. Yet there was not a girl on all the windings of the Rocky Fork who had more laughter in her eyes, or smoother cheeks, or darker polished hair. “Sure’s my name is Wilda Coon,” said the small woman beneath her breath, “yonder comes Lanson Bundle.” The man she saw was yet far off, plodding across the valley toward her hillside; and as he had taken that walk nearly every evening for a dozen years, it should have ceased to surprise her. Yet as shadows thickened among rock and naked trees, it was always a satisfaction to turn and look back from that particular point and exclaim, “Yonder comes Lanson Bundle!” Wilda’s log-house had a clearing and some acres of trees around it, standing like a German principality or an oasis in the midst of Alanson Bundle’s great farm. The Bundles had vainly tried in times past to buy out the Coons. But Alanson had other views. He had courted Wilda twelve years, and he calculated in time to wear her out. She could not go on forever raising patches of truck in the summer, and quilting and sewing in the winter.