returned, sullenly.

"I do," the glib grandmother interposed. "Ye jes' gin we-uns a sniff an' a sup, an' then ye tuk the kittle that leaks an' shook the rest of the coffee beans from out yer milk-piggin inter it, an' sot out an' marched yer-self through the laurel—I wonder nuthin' didn't ketch ye! howsomever naught is never in danger—an' went ter that horspital camp o' the rebels on Big Injun Mounting—smallpox horspital it is—an' gin that precious coffee away to the enemies o' yer kentry."

"Nobody comes nor goes ter that place—hell itself ain't so avoided," said Mrs. Brusie, her forehead corrugated with sudden recurrence of anxiety. "Nobody else in this world would have resked it, 'ceptin' that headin' contrairy gal, Ethelindy Brusie."

"I never resked nuthin," protested Ethelinda. "I stopped at the head of a bluff far off, an' hollered down ter 'em in the clearin' an' held up the kittle. An' two or three rebs war out of thar tents in the clearin'—thar be a good sight o' new graves up thar!—an' them men war hollerin' an' wavin' me away, till they seen what I war doin'; jes' settin' down the kittle an' startin' off."

She gazed meditatively into the fire, of set purpose avoiding the eyes fixed upon her, and sought to justify her course.

"I knowed ez we-uns hed got used ter doin' 'thout coffee, an' don't feel the need of it now. We-uns air well an' stout, an' live in our good home an' beside our own h'a'th-stone; an' they air sick, an' pore, an' cast out, an' I reckon they ain't ever been remembered before in gifts. An' I 'lowed the coffee, bein' unexpected an' a sorter extry, mought put some fraish heart an' hope in 'em—leastwise show 'em ez God don't 'low 'em ter be plumb furgot."

She still gazed meditatively at the fire as if it held a scroll of her recollections, which she gradually interpreted anew. "I looked back wunst, an' one o' them rebs had sot down on a log an' war sobbin' ez ef his heart would bust. An' another of 'em war signin, at me agin an' agin, like he was drawin' a cross in the air—one pass down an' then one across—an' the other reb war jes' laffin' fur joy, and wunst in a while he yelled out: 'Blessin's on ye! Blessin's! Blessin's!' I dun'no' how fur I hearn that sayin'. The rocks round the creek war repeatin' it, whenst I crossed the f oot-bredge. I dun'no what the feller meant—mought hev been crazy."

A tricksy gust stirred at the door as if a mischievous hand twitched the latch-string, but it hung within. There was a pause. The listening children on the hearth sighed and shifted their posture; one of the hounds snored sonorously in the silence.

"Nuthin' crazy thar 'ceptin' you-uns!—one fool gal—that's all!" said her grandmother, with her knitting-needles and her spectacles glittering in the firelight. "That is a pest camp. Ye mought hev cotch the smallpox. I be lookm' fur ye ter break out with it any day. When the war is over an' the men come back to the Cove, none of 'em will so much as look at ye, with yer skin all pock-marked—fair an' fine as it is now, like a pan of fraish milk."

"But, granny, it won't be sp'ilt! The camp war too fur off—an' thar warn't a breath o' wind. I never went a-nigh 'em."

"I dun'no' how fur smallpox kin travel—an' it jes' mulls and mulls in ye afore it breaks out—don't it, S'briny?"

"Don't ax me," said Mrs. Brusie, with a worried air. "I ain't no yerb doctor, nor nurse tender, nuther. Ethelindy is beyond my understandin'."

She was beyond her own understanding, as she sat weeping slowly, silently. The aspect of those forlorn graves, that recorded the final ebbing of hope and life at the pest camp, had struck her recollection with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion—they were naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final mystery; she felt vaguely grieved for their sake, and she gave the clay that covered them, still crude red clods with not yet a blade of grass, the fellowship of her tears.

A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man's disused brain. "Tell me one thing, Ethelindy," he said, lifting his bleared eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his stick—"tell me this—which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?"

"I'm fur the Union," said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but small in proportion to her size. "I'm fur the Union—fust an' last an' all the time."

The old man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast on his wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard ter live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of Tanglefoot Cove."

The presence of the "critter company" was indeed calculated to inspire a most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power which one might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house. Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is little more than a mile. On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable, and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among the dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent and stunted, yet had not sufficed to break.

The blacksmith's shop, the centre of the primitive civilization, had soon an expectant group in its widely flaring doors, for the smith had had enough of the war, and had come back to wistfully, hopelessly haunt his anvil like some uneasy ghost visiting familiar scenes in which he no more bears a part;—a minié-ball had shattered his stanch hammer-arm, and his duties were now merely advisory to a clumsy apprentice. This was a half-witted fellow, a giant in strength, but not to be trusted with firearms. In these days of makeweights his utility had been discovered, and now with the smith's hammer in his hand he joined the group, his bulging eyes all a-stare and his loose lips hanging apart. The old justice of the peace, whose office was a sinecure, since the war had run the law out of the Cove, came with a punctilious step, though with a sense of futility and abated dignity, and at every successive note of the distant trumpet these wights experienced a tense bracing of the nerves to await helplessly the inevitable and, alas! the inexorable.

"They say that he is a tumble, tumble man," the blacksmith averred, ever and anon rubbing the stump of his amputated hammer-arm, in which, though bundled in its jeans' sleeve, he had the illusion of the sensation of its hand and fingers. He suddenly shaded his brow with his broad palm to eye that significant line which marked the road among the pines on the eastern slope, beyond the Indian corn that stood tall and rank of growth in the rich bottom-lands.

Ethelinda's heart sank. All unprescient of the day's impending event, she had come to the forge with the sley of her loom to be mended, and she now stood holding the long shaft in her mechanical clasp, while she listened spell-bound to the agitated talk of the group. The boughs of a great yellow hickory waved above her head; near by was the trough, and here a horse, brought to be