occurred to me before," he said, slowly; "and it is worth one's thought, too. Of the people below I have not much personal knowledge; they are mostly from the foreign element that the coal work brings there; then they are somewhat transitory-their good and evil as well. But up here it is different. Two-thirds of the names in the hills have been heard there for generations, and they keep so closely the attributes of their ancestry that, whether good or bad, it would be a mighty work to attempt changing their ways of life; their faults and virtues are rooted in the soil here." "So Don has learned," remarked Dinah.

Mr. Winston's kindly face kindled with a quizzical smile; evidently Don's accumulation of knowledge in that direction was no secret.

"But they have their virtues," he added, earnestly, "and they are sturdy as their vices. They are virtuous, surely, beyond the virtue of the crowds, and beyond their own spirituality or mentality, at the same time that they have a looseness of moral code that in an incomprehensible way runs parallel with a queer sort of honesty. For instance, a man may steal timber off another person's ground and suffer no loss of caste in the eyes of his neighbors, but if he is known to steal a hog or a sheep, or even a chicken, it is a slur on him not easy to be got rid of. Taking them as a class, they are full of contradictions; but the more flagrantly dishonest are those who have drifted away from the hills and brought back vice from the world outside."

'Well, when even the honest ones may steal timber," began Dinah, dubiously.

"No, I do not say the honest ones do so," corrected Mr. Winston, smiling; but they simply follow what has become a matter of habit. Since the time of the Indian, tomahawk claims and shotgun policy have been powers in the wood country. It is only of late that boundaries

through the timber have become distinct things, and they are too new to win the respect of natives whose forefathers owned the mountain, by courage if not legality. There are so many things to consider, that one can do little toward presenting the morally legal point of view to them. Time will do what words will not, and the wildness of the forests must be broken before you can drive out old customs; they will stick like the wildcats so long as the ledges are here for them to creep under."

The evening, social and pleasant, wore on; the dusk crept from the east, and the evening star hung like a jewel in its meshes. But while the conversation drifted from the local present of the whites to the local past of the people whose color is even unknown to us-the builders of vanished forts within whose space strange ancient trees still grow-Don someway dropped out of the conversation. Mr. Winston's summing up of the traits of the people he had to deal with had put him into a brown study, one in which golden gleams of light were needed to bring harmony.

"Don is in dreamland," said Miss Lottie, nodding toward the still form in the corner of the porch, while Dinah made some remark about " spring fever" and its effect on people who were constitutionally lazy to begin with.

"I never knew, however, that it deprived people of speech entirely," she added. He aroused himself and smiled around at them.

"Don't mind me," he entreated. "I am not sleeping, nor nearly so far away from your themes as you imagine. Some of them have taken possession of me, and I was only thinking."

And he was "only thinking" next morning, when the sun bewitched the mists up from the valley, and he rode rather silently beside Mr. Winston over the mountain.

That conversation the night before had helped him to some ideas about the people he had to deal with, and he needed them.

He found himself confronted by technicalities and responsibilities that would need a more practiced hand than his to grasp, unless some clearer insight should lead him into the comprehension of the people.

All knowledge of books or the world he had lived in was of no help here. He was looked on as a greenhorn," and he knew it. He could have settled several questions by law and established a reputation for hard-headedness, but he would look in the rude cabins and in the faces of barefooted children, and then ride away leaving them on their native heath; and even his friends had begun to laugh over the hopelessness of his endeavors. If only his past years of trifling had not told so against him-if only someone had shown faith; but the lack of it was drifting his own far afield. Mr. Winston's ideas of the people had not helped him in that respect, but they had given him some thoughts of the people that were new; they had been humming in his brain all night.

The house of Riker was neither on the mountain nor in the valley, but just on the border of each; and a Sabbath stillness lay about it, over the sunlit clearing and the few horses hitched to the rickety fence. The children, a bevy of yellow heads and thin, flail-like legs, were grouped about the corners of the chimney, with furtive eyes, as if poised for instant abashed flight, as each new-comer emerged from the forest above them, or tramped up along the rocky, bushy township road that passed the stable.

Out at the wood-pile, the men were gathered, “hunkered" down on the ground or perched against the fence, talking in rather subdued tones, because of the young dead thing that lay in the shadowy corner of the cabin.

The women, and a few shy, uneasy children with sun-bonnets on, were standing about the door, exchanging remarks of the health or sickness prevalent to the season. One old brown-faced creature, with the pathos of eye that Angelo gave the shearwoman of the Fates, covered the coffined face with a white handkerchief, and laid her unsteady hand with a little pat of condolence on the mother's shoulder. Her voice, in the kindly, stereotyped phrases with which people think to ease despairing grief, fell on the ears at the door, and though the words were not distinguishable to them, the meaning was, and they checked the desultory exchange of remarks and bent sympathetic heads in embarrassed respect.

One woman, or it may have been a girl, was close enough to hear those words of attempted comfort. She sat somewhat apart from the rest, at the head of the coffin, every now and then driving away a fly that persisted in returning. She had been there when the earliest of the other women had come in the morning. Some of them had spoken to her in a subdued, equivocal way, not as though they knew her, but rather divined who she must be; and as she sat there close to the wall, the coffin on trestles of chairs looked like a barrier between herself and the others. The face could scarcely be seen in the great shadows of a slab bonnet that had surely been made for a larger head than hers; but the mouth and chin emerging from the shadows were too softly curved to belong to other than youth. The mouth even grew tremulous with sympathy as the words of the old woman reached her. She was speaking of the other children who were left, of the one little baby in the cradle that they all agreed was like Addy had been at her age. There were some words, too, of the love of the Christ for little children and the surety of Addy being safe up there, and awaiting the others who were left; and

the figure by the coffin grew quite still and rigid in the intentness of listening to the homely comfort.

And then the baby spoken of stirred in its box-cradle, and before its little wail could break the fraughtful silence, the girl from the corner had crossed the room and gathered it in her arms without disturbing another that slept beside it. She stilled its querulous protest as if by some mesmeric touch, and stepped softly with it back to her place by the wall.

The mother, with strained, tearless eyes, was looking out of the little square window into the truck-patch, where some nodding jonquils and young onions grew side by side; but she saw none of the springing green or the gold of the blossoms, her own loss loomed too close, blotting out all but despair from her gaze. Her lips twitched convulsively, as if attempting to give answer to the speech of the old woman, but no words came. With a pathetically dumb movement, she raised the corner of a rusty black apron and pressed it and her work-worn hands against her mouth, rocking to and fro silently; and the old neighbor looked at her, shaking her head over this suppressed rebellion against "The Will," and sat down near her, looking about and noting the floor that was clean-scrubbed, and the posts of the bed protruding from the hole in the loft, where it had been moved from down-stairs to make room for the gathering. But the quiet girl with the baby raised her eyes again and again to the face of the mother. There seemed something contagious to her in that nervous twitching of the piteous mouth, for twice she half arose from the low chair, but the heads of the women at the door turned toward her at each movement, and with a little deprecating cough she sat down again; but from the window a short indrawn breath, that was half a sob, brought her to her feet, and