The pale blue eyes, half-hidden by the bushy red side-burns that floated wildly out on either side of Mr. Doggett's face, like sunburnt bunches of broom sedge blown in a high wind, included all his audience with a comprehensive beam of agreeability. Finally these pleasant eyes rested, in the enforced deference due the most prosperous guest, on the thick-set man with the hog-like neck, and the enormous mole, that stood, sentinel-like beside the left nostril of his rose-colored, aquiline nose. For reasons domestic and infantile, a portion of the Doggetts' Sunday's company,--Susie Dutton and Hattie Leeds, the two daughters, and Lem and Jim, the two married sons, the four spouses and the eight babes, had taken a reluctant mid-afternoon departure. The unfettered guests, Mr. Nathan Lindsay, Gran'dad Doggett, who was staying with his daughter, Lindy Gumm, over on the River,--and Mr. Galvin Brock (he of the mole and the nose) who had been young Callie Doggett's second husband, lingered. Mr. Lindsay, who held himself a step above the Doggetts, but was not averse to a Sunday's visit to that hospitable household, had suggested that it was warmer outdoors than in the house. The three guests, with their host and his youngest son, sat in the pleasant warmth of the late afternoon's sunshine, at the woodpile on the west side of the house. Mr. Brock's usual manner of answering a question was by an assenting or dissenting grunt. This time, however, his mouth left its grim line an instant. "If it keeps as dry as it is now," he observed, "nobody's tobaccer will see a killin' frost unhoused." During the Civil War, Gran'dad Doggett, on account of what he called "a leetle shootin' scrape, but nothin' criminal," had brought his young family from Bell County, in the Kentucky Mountains, to the Blue Grass. Before this flitting of necessity, he had been a Justice of the Peace, which fact, ever afterward caused him to affect an air of conscious superiority toward his son. "More than that, Ephriam," he remarked, corroborating Mr. Brock's observation, "more than that, frost don't never kill in the dark o' the moon. I'd 'a' thought in the thirty year you've been a raisin' terbaccer, you'd 'a' learned that!" "That's right, old man, yes, sir"--Mr. Doggett's slow drawl was affable in the extreme--"that's jest what I told the boys. A body hain't no use to cross a bridge afore they gits to hit! Jim now, he wuz might' night' wilted down along in July, afeerd the best part o' his crop wuz a Frenchin', but hit growed off all right, and now hit's the best terbaccer he's got! I'm afeerd he'll have too much fer his barn and he'll want to put some in mine.