chanct I want ye ter go thar an’ larn ter do things. I’d er done hit ef I’d er been a man. But don’t say nothin’ to ye pappy.”

This caution was unnecessary; and what a change the simple words made for Steve! His spirit bounded up into the world of visions again, and when dinner was on the table he refused to take a mouthful of the savoury rabbit, so ashamed was he of the manner of its killing.

After this his mind was constantly on the watch which was to come. How it was to reach him he did not think out, for the simple reason that he knew nothing of the distance which stretched between him and the city, nor of methods of communication. No letter or piece of mail of any sort had ever come to 23 his home, or that of any one else of which he knew but things of various sorts were gotten from the crossroads store ten miles away, skillets and pans, axes and hoes, which were made somewhere, and he supposed some time when some one of the community went to the store they’d find his watch there. But week after week went by till spring came on, and nobody went to the store. The mountain folk indeed had little need of stores. They spun and wove the cloth for their clothes, raised their corn, pigs, and tobacco, made their own “sweetin’,” long and short, meaning sugar and molasses, and distilled their own whiskey. So the boy’s heart grew heavy again with the long delay and he began to think bitterly that his father and not his mother was right, when one day a stranger whom he had never seen before drove up to the door.

“Howdye! Does airy feller named Stephen Langly live here?” said the stranger, reining in his tired, raw-boned steed without difficulty.

Mirandy went to the cabin door, stared a minute in surprise and then shook her head slowly. But Steve pushed past her saying:

“Yes, thar is, too. I’m Stephen Langly.”

“You! Sakes erlive, I clean forgot that was yo’ name!” and his sister laughed lazily, while the stranger joined in.

“Wal, you’re a powerful little chap to be a-gittin’ mail. But this here thing has yo’ name on it, they tole me at the store, an’ so I brung it along as I was a-comin’ this-a-way. Hit’s been thar mo’ than three months they tole me.”

Steve took the package, his hands trembling with eagerness and would have darted away to the woods with his treasure where he might look upon it first alone, but Mirandy stormed when he turned to go, and the man said:

“’Pears to me you mought show what ye got, when I brung it all this long ways to ye.”

That did seem the fair thing to do, so when they had asked the man to “light and hitch,” Steve sat down on the door-step and removed the wrappings from the square box; there was tissue paper first, a miracle of daintiness which the boy had never beheld before, and at last the watch came to view. Steve lifted it in trembling fingers, and while Mirandy and the man expressed their admiration his first quivering words were:

“That other one was yaller.”

“Wal, now,” said Mirandy, “that one was gold; you couldn’t expect that man to send you no gold.”

Mirandy, having a precious gilded trinket, was better posted on the colour and value of metals than Steve, though she made a slight error in her next statement.

“This hern is silver; that’s the next thing to gold,” and the bright nickel of the Waterbury twinkled in the spring sunshine as though trying to measure up to its admirers’ estimate.

“A silver watch,” said the stranger after he had heard the story of that autumn day with its promise of a watch which was just now fulfilled––“wal, you air a lucky boy, shore.”

Mrs. Langly called feebly from within, and Steve 26 went and laid it on the bed beside her. Her “stomick had never seemed to get on the hooks,” as she expressed it, all winter; her spinning-wheel and loom had been long silent, and for a few days she had not left her bed.

Her eyes gleamed with strange, new fire as they fell upon the shining thing which belonged to another world from theirs, and when Steve had laboriously wound it, which he had not forgotten how to do, setting the wonderful machinery running, she whispered to him:

“Remember you air goin’ whar you kin larn to make things lack that.”

Steve’s shining eyes answered hers, though the boy failed to catch the light of prophecy and final benediction which they held. Hugging his treasure, with no hint of oncoming change he went out to feed the stranger’s horse while Mirandy prepared the dinner.

It was not until the visitor had gone and Steve was in the solitude of the woods with Tige that he found fullest joy in his new possession. It seemed to him he could never in all his life take his eyes from it again. He watched the hands go round and round, the little flying second hand, the more leisurely minute marker and the creeping hand which told the hours as they passed. Then again and 27 again the back was opened and the busy little wheels held his breathless interest. He took no notice of Tige, but the old dog knew that his mate was happy and lay content beside him. Although for the first time in possession of a noter of the hours, he lost all account of time and did not move from the mossy bed where he had thrown himself until it was too late to see either hands or wheels. Then he called Tige to come and hurried back to his home to sit by the cabin firelight till Mirandy made him go to bed. The family all slept in the same room, three beds occupying corners; this main room and the lean-to kitchen constituting the whole house.

Steve’s watch never left his hand the long night through, and for the first time in his uneventful life he slept fitfully, waking every little while to make sure it was there.

Jim Langly was away for a few days “to a logrolling” several miles away and did not return until dusk of the evening after Steve’s watch came. The boy sat again by the firelight, watch in hand, when Jim walked in at the door. His eyes fell at once upon the strange, shining thing and his face was convulsed with sudden wrath:

“Didn’t I tell ye to have nothin’ to do with city folks? Ye shan’t keep that thing. I’ll smash it, so he’p me God!” But before he could lift a hand a 28 scream came from the bed, and Mrs. Langly sat up wild and dishevelled.

“Let him hev it, Jim Langly, let him hev it,” and then she dropped back gray and still. Jim Langly had seen that gray stillness before, and he stood looking upon it now in dumb terror. His wife had been ailing a long time, it was true, yet no one had thought of death. But the grim visitor was there in all his quiet majesty. The weary spirit, which had for so many years longed for flight into new haunts of men, had winged its way at last to a far, mysterious country of which she had heard little, but towards which for months past she had been reaching out with a strange prescience of which no one guessed.

It was a dreary night at the cabin. No one tried to sleep. Jim Langly said no more to Steve about the watch, and the boy wore it in his bosom attached to a stout string about his neck, keeping it out of sight, and sobbing in the stillness of the woods as he wandered with Tige, “Mammy wanted me to have it.” And though his joy in it for the time was gone, there was peculiar comfort in this thought of her approval. The old dog looked up in the boy’s face from time to time pitifully, or stuck his nose in the lad’s hand, knowing well, in a way dogs have, what had