The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass, holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before. This made a beautiful pea-green carpet in summer and a comfortable straw-colored matting in winter; and it was the only bit of sentiment that clung to Cottontown. All the rest of it was practical enough: Rows of scurvy three-roomed cottages, all exactly alike, even to the gardens in the rear, laid off in equal breadth and running with the same unkept raggedness up the flinty side of the mountain. There was not enough originality among the worked-to-death inhabitants of Cottontown to plant their gardens differently; for all of them had the same weedy turnip-patch on one side, straggling tomatoes on another, and half-dried mullein-stalks sentineling the corners. For years these cottages had not been painted, and now each wore the same tinge of sickly yellow paint. It was not difficult to imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever in which the village doctor had used abundant plasters of mustard, and the disease had finally run into "yaller ja'ndice," as they called it in Cottontown. And thus Cottontown had stood for several years, a new problem in Southern life and industry, and a paying one for the Massachusetts directors. In the meanwhile another building had been put up--a little cheaply built chapel, of long-leaf yellow pine. It was known as the Bishop's church, and sat on the side of the mountain, half way up among the black-jacks, exposed to the blistering suns of summer and the winds of winter. It had never been painted: "An' it don't need it," as the Bishop had said when the question of painting it had been raised by some of the members. "No, it don't need it, for the hot sun has drawed all the rosin out on its surface, an' pine rosin's as good a paint as any church needs. Jes' let God be, an' He'll fix His things like He wants 'em any way. He put the paint in the pine-tree when He made it. Now man is mighty smart,--he can make paint, but he can't make a pine tree." It was Sunday morning, and as the Bishop drove along to church he was still thinking of Jack Bracken and Captain Tom, and the burial of little Jack. When he arose that morning Jack was up, clean-shaved and neatly dressed. As Mrs. Watts, the Bishop's wife, had become used, as she expressed it, to his "fetchin' any old thing, frum an old hoss to an old man home, wharever he finds 'em,"--she did not express any surprise at having a new addition to the family.