Is that deep shadow dark’ning now thine eye Repentant sorrow for the willow’s plight, As though the stern gloom of the cypress nigh Thou speedest like a Naiad of the night? O life--life--life--and hast thou found it so, A journey now in sunlight, now in shade-- A laughter from the willows bending low A gloom-sob which the cypresses have made? JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE. Little Sister Little Sister was Col. Rutherford’s only grandchild. She was also Capt. John Rutherford’s only niece. I mention the last-named gentleman because he had a great deal to do with the making of this story. He was quite original himself, and a braver, bigger-hearted friend no man ever had. The Rutherford home was in the Middle Basin of Tennessee. The house was built in 1812 by John Rutherford the first, who had eaten, slept, fought, and finally died, with his old friend, Andrew Jackson. No truer, better, braver people than the Rutherfords lived. No black sheep ever came out of the flock. I have always maintained that a family’s ability to refrain from throwing scrubs is the truest test of its purity. The prepotency that produced dead-game, honest and true men and women every time, is a long way ahead of “Norman blood.” “That’s the genuine stuff,” as little three-year-old Sister once naively remarked after looking over Uncle John’s pacing filly. However, that’s a story I will tell later. When I first knew Little Sister she was only two years old, for just two years before a terrible gloom had settled over the Rutherford home when Little Sister’s mother, the Colonel’s daughter, had died. Death is a terrible, bitter, hollow mockery to those who live. Some day, in another world, we shall see things differently. In this, “cabined, cribbed, confined” in our puny environments, we see only “through a glass darkly,” and so God help us. As I said, she was the old Colonel’s only daughter--the fairest, frailest, most lovely and most intellectual--a bride one year, and we buried her the next. That’s all, except Little Sister, a fair, frail, hot-tempered, sensitive--all brain and nerve--little tot who came to take her mother’s place. Her bright blue eyes, pale-pink face and red-flaxen hair kept one thinking of perpetual sunsets and twilights. She was a _fac simile_ of her mother--intellect, impulsiveness, loveliness, all except one thing--temper. She was fire and powder there. A flash, an explosion--then she was sobbing for forgiveness in your arms. That was Little Sister. “I can’t see where in the world she gets her temper from,” Grandmother Rutherford said when two-year-old Little Sister slapped her squarely in the face one day and then hung sobbing around the old lady’s neck as if the blow had broken her own heart. “Col. Rutherford,” she would add impressively, “this child ought to be spanked till she is conquered.”