him for another week, when a farmer comin' in with milk 'bout daylight had the life pretty nigh scared out o' him by Dick stopping him, sayin' he was thirsty, and then liftin' the lid off the tin without so much as 'by your leave,' and takin' his fill of the can. 'Bout a week after that the rope got tangled up in the belfry over the court-house so they couldn't ring for fires, and the janitor went up to fix it, and when he came down his legs was shakin' so he couldn't stand. What do you think he'd found?" And the landlord leaned over and broke out in a laugh, striking the table with the flat of his hand until every plate and tumbler rattled.

I made no answer.

"By gosh, there was Dick sound asleep! He had a bed and blankets and lots o' provisions, and was just as comfortable as a bug in a rug. He'd been there ever since he got out of the mineral hole! Tell you I got to laugh whenever I think of it. Dick laughed 'bout it himself t'other day when he told me what fun he had listenin' to Ike and the deputies plannin' to catch him. There ain't another man around here who'd been smart enough to pick out the belfry. He was right over the room in the court-house where they was, ye see, and he could look down 'tween the cracks and hear every word they said. Rainy nights he'd sneak out, and his mother would come down to the market, and he'd see her outside. They never tracked her, of course, when she come there. He told me she wanted him to go clean away somewheres, but he wouldn't leave her.

"When the janitor got his breath he busted in on Ike and the others sittin' 'round swappin' lies how they'd catch Dick, and Ike reached for his gun and crep' up the ladder with two deputies behind him, and Ike was so scared and so 'fraid he'd lose the money that he fired 'fore Dick got on his feet. The ball broke his leg, and they all jumped in and clubbed him over the head and carried him downstairs for dead in his blankets, and laid him on a butcher's table in the market, and all the folks in the market crowded 'round to look at him, lyin' there with his head hangin' down over the table like a stuck calf's, and his clothes all bloody. Then Ike handcuffed him and started for Stoneburg in a wagon 'fore Dick come to."

"That's why he couldn't walk to-night," I asked, "and why the driver took him over in the stage?"

"Yes, that was it. He'll never get over it. Sometimes he's all right, and then ag'in it hurts him terrible, 'specially when the weather's bad.

"All the time he was up to Stoneburg them last four years—he got a year off for good behavior—he kept makin' little things and sellin' 'em to the visitors. Everybody went to his cell—it was the first place the warders took 'em, and they all bought things from Dick. He had a nice word for everybody, kind and comforting-like. He was the handiest feller you ever see. When he got out he had twenty-nine dollars. He give every cent to his mother. Warden told him when he left he hadn't had no better man in the prison since he had been 'p'inted. And there ain't no better feller now. It's a darned mean shame how Chris Rankin and them fellers is down on him, knowin', too, how it all turned out."

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the landlord. I was conscious of a slight choking in my throat which could hardly be traced to the dryness of the beef. I was conscious, too, of a peculiar affection of the eyes. Two or three lamps seemed to be swimming around the room, and one or more blurred landlords were talking to me with elbows on tables.

"What do you think yourself about that money of the farmer's?" I asked automatically, though I do not think even now that I had the slightest suspicion of his guilt. "Do you believe he stole the three dollars when he handed the wallet back?"

"Stole 'em? Not by a d—— sight! Didn't I tell you? Thought I had. That galoot of a farmer dropped it in the woods 'longside the road when he got out to fix his traces, and he was too full of Chris Rankin's rum to remember it, and after Dick had been sent up for the second time, the second time now, mind ye, and had been in two years for walking off with Rankin's ham, a lot of school children huntin' for ches'nuts come upon that same envelope in the ditch with them three new dollars in it, covered up under the leaves and the weeds a-growin' over it. Ben Mulford's girl found it."

"What, the child he had with him tonight?"

"Yes, little freckle-faced girl with white eyes. Oh, I tell you Dick's awful fond of that kid."

A KENTUCKY CINDERELLA

was bending over my easel, hard at work upon a full-length portrait of a young girl in a costume of fifty years ago, when the door of my studio opened softly and Aunt Chloe came in.

"Good-mawnin', suh! I did n' think you'd come to-day, bein' a Sunday," she said, with a slight bend of her knees. "I'll jes' sweep up a lil mite; doan' ye move, I won't 'sturb ye."

Aunt Chloe had first opened my door a year before with a note from Marny, a brother brush, which began with "Here is an old Southern mammy who has seen better days; paint her if you can," and ended with, "Any way, give her a job."

The bearer of the note was indeed the ideal mammy, even to the bandanna handkerchief bound about her head, and the capacious waist and ample bosom—the lullaby resting-place for many a child, white and black. I had never seen a real one in the flesh before. I had heard about them in my earlier days. Daddy Billy, my father's body servant and my father's slave, who lived to be ninety-four, had told me of his own Aunt Mirey, who had died in the old days, but too far back for me to remember. And I had listened, when a boy, to the traditions connected with the plantations of my ancestors,—of the Keziahs and Mammy Crouches and Mammy Janes,—but I had never looked into the eyes of one of the old school until I saw Aunt Chloe, nor had I ever fully realized how quaintly courteous and gentle one of them could be until, with an old-time manner, born of a training seldom found outside of the old Southern homes, she bent forward, spread her apron with both hands, and with a little backward dip had said as she left me that first day: "Thank ye, suh! I'll come eve'y Sunday mawnin'. I'll do my best to please ye, an' I specs I kin."

I do not often work on Sunday, but my picture had been too long delayed waiting for a faded wedding dress worn once by the original when she was a bride, and which had only been found when two of her descendants had ransacked their respective garrets.

"Mus' be mighty driv, suh," she said, "a-workin' on de Sabbath day. Golly, but dat's a purty lady!" and she put down her pail. "I see it las' Sunday when I come in, but she didn't had dem ruffles 'round her neck den dat you done gib her. 'Clar' to goodness, dat chile look like she was jes' a-gwine to speak."