There was a hesitating drop, another, upon the clap-boards that roofed the house; then came the heavy down-pour of the rain, the renewed gusts of the wind, and amidst it all a husky cry. They turned and looked at one another. Then Hiram Guyther lifted the latch. The opening door let in the moist, melancholy air of the stormy evening that seemed to saturate the room in pervading it. A crouching figure, the sombre clouds, the slanting lines of rain, the tossing dark woods, were barely visible without, until a sudden, blue forked flash, of lightning played through this dusky landscape of grays and browns. As it broadened into a diffusive red flare, it showed an ox with low-hanging horns between the shafts of a queer little cart, piled high with household goods. Among them half smothered in the quilts—wound tightly about her shoulders—appeared the yellow head, and pink face, and big, startled gray eyes of a little girl. It was only for a moment that this picture was presented, then it faded away to the dark monotony of the shapeless shadows of the woods; and as Ike went to the door he heard the drawling voice of the man he had seen at Keedon Bluffs asking Hiram Guyther for shelter for the night. “We-uns hev been travelin’ an’ hoped ter git settled fur the winter ’fore enny sech weather ez this lit onto us.” “Kem in, traveler! Ye air hearty welcome ef ye kin put up with sech ez we-uns kin gin ye,” the hospitable mountaineer drawled sonorously, raising his voice that it might be heard above the blast. “We’ll all hev pleurisy, though, ef ye don’t shet that thar door, an’ keep it shet,” muttered aunt Jemima, in her half articulate undertone. She was silent the next moment, for there was slowly coming into the room—nay, into the grim heart of aunt Jemima—a new power in her life. A yellow-topped, cylindrical bundle, much like a silking ear of corn, was set on end in the middle of the puncheon floor, and as the strange man unwrapped the parti-colored quilts from about it, there stepped forth, golden-haired, ragged, smiling, with one finger between her small and jagged teeth, with dimples that graced the poverty and atoned for the dirt, a little girl, looking quaintly askance at the group about the fire, and making straight for the little chair under the shelf. She did not move it. She sat there, under the shelf, smiling and pink and affectedly shy. Aunt Jemima stared over her spectacles. She too smiled as her eyes met the child’s—a grim demonstration. Her features adapted themselves to it reluctantly as if they were not used to it. “Kem up by the fire, child,” she said. But the little girl sat still under the shelf. “Warm yer feet!” aunt Jemima further sought to beguile her. The little guest’s pleased smile took on the proportions of an ecstatic grin, but she only settled herself more comfortably in the small chair under the shelf.