hang in the skyline are to pour into her lap. Back home, breakfast over, as John left the table he tossed a letter to me. It was Dicky’s letter for which I have waited a whole week. It is in answer to the dozen I have sent out to her—like wireless messages of distress. In the yard, out beyond the shadow of the big white pines, drying my hair—the women of Marsville have no beauty parlour in which to ruin it with dry air—lying full length in the sun, my head pillowed on a cushion, pondering Dicky’s letter, reading it over and over, I was jarred out of my reverie by a poke in the ribs and the mountaineer’s, “Howdy.” I failed to respond, was poked in the ribs a second time, sprang up indignantly and glared into the dirty, smiling landscape that is the face of old Sallie Singleton. “I thought I knowed that old back,” her harsh voice said amiably. Old back, indeed. Unmindful of my lack of cordiality the floodgates opened and harsh verbal oceans submerged me. I tried to shut it out, but I could not. “Mis Golightly hadn’t let the fire go out on her hearth for nigh forty year, but she went over the mountain to visit her daughter that had her first baby. In hearing of the train she took homesick and hiked it back. Savannah Lou was old-like, as I knowed, and, as I knowed, her beau died. He was full of debts as a dog is full of fleas, and the Lord knowed what he was doing when He took him. She had a picter left stid o’ a man, and she was a sight happier with the picter then she’d a ben with the man. When he was courtin’ they’d set and set, and talk and talk. He never took her nowhere—not even as far as her nose. She set store by the picter. She’d had a picter man put whiskers on it. She’d allus knowed whiskers’d become him, but he was stubborn and wouldn’t grow ’em. She——”