One of the girl's first acts was to gather two great sheaves of forget-me-nots. These she carried to the orchard. Lem walked beside her, and now they both fell silent. Dividing the flowers equally, Belle-Ann knelt down and arranged them with infinite care. "Maw loved these," she whispered. "Maw loved these best of all, didn't she, Lem?" She looked up through a film of mist. Their eyes met, and Lem turned his back and walked slowly away and did not answer. For half an hour the girl lingered there between these two graves with her memories. When she finally got to her feet and lifted her swollen eyes, she saw Slab standing looking at her. The tears were streaming down his ancient, creased visage. His lips moved helplessly, but no words crossed them. He could only point to numberless withered flowers, and seared wreaths scattered hard by, which he had discarded to replace with fresh ones. "Yes, Slab--you-all did not forget, did you?" she managed to say. The old negro shook his white head, too overcome to respond. Belle-Ann and Lem then made the rounds of the place, followed by little Buddy, lugging his father's rifle. They walked out beneath the magnolias, and the giant pines, and visited their old haunts, each of which stirred memories of hours agone. When they returned to the house, Slab had a most tasteful meal prepared for them. The menu consisted of two kinds of bread, hoe-cake, and hot butter-milk biscuits with honey. It also embraced baked yams with fresh butter, fried spring chicken, poached eggs, rich, fresh milk, and blackberries and cream. As Belle-Ann lingered over this repast, she felt that she had not, during her absence, tasted anything quite so delicious. Near dusk, Slab took up his hybrid banjo and repaired to the witch-elm block, followed by the others. There, with the blind hound's aged head in her lap, Belle-Ann joined in the chorus of "Kitty Wells." And as the shadows stole down and put their arms about them, the day lifted, and the thread-like note of the mock-thrush ebbed away from the blossomed sides of the mountain. The plaintive callings of the Bob White ceased, and the forest birds folded their wings. And another choir of voices awoke to cross and re-cross the void of twilight. The katydids began to purl. A symphony of crickets trilled away in the darkling rhododendron thickets. The tree-frogs piped an avalanche of pleading notes amid the ruby-throated magnolias. The silvery treble of the nightingale floated down from afar, and the hilarious killdeers, king of all-night revelers, screamed aloft and flapped their speckled wings in the early starlight. And above this, in soughing, alternate waves of sound, a titanic rhythm trailed into this medley of wilderness voices--the savage, deathless music of the cascade ranting in the rock-barbed throat of Hellsfork, dying, swelling, reverberating like the barbaric boom of a tom-tom.