ore
eccentric. On mild summer evenings she would come down stairs with her
head wrapped in a pink knitted "nubia," and stroll back and forth along
the gravelled walk, her gaunt figure passing into the dusk of the cedar
avenue and emerging like the erratic shadow of one of the sombre trees.

Sometimes Eugenia joined her, but Bernard, her favourite, held shyly
aloof. In her exercise she seldom spoke, and her words were peevish
ones, but there was grim pathos in her carriage as she moved slowly back
and forth between the straight rows of box.

After supper the family assembled on the porch and talked in a desultory
way until ten o'clock, when the lights were put out and the house
retired to rest. Eugenia slept in a great, four-post bedstead with Aunt
Chris, and the bed was so large and soft and billowy that she seemed to
lose herself suddenly at night in its lavender-scented midst, and to be
as suddenly discovered in the morning by Rindy, the house-girl, when she
came with her huge pails of warm water.

Those fresh summer dawns of Eugenia's childhood became among her dearest
memories in after years. There were hours when, awaking, wide-eyed,
before the house was astir, she would rise on her elbow and look out
across the dripping lawn, where each dewdrop was charged with opalescent
tints, to the western horizon, where the day broke in a cloud of gold.
The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came
to her with unsuspected melody--a melody drawn from the freshness, the
loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric
ecstasy of dawn.

Then, with the rising of the sun, Aunt Chris would turn upon her pillow
and open her soft, brown eyes.

"It is not good for little folks to be awake so early," she would say,
and there would rush upon the child a sense of warmth and tenderness and
comfort, and she would nestle closer to her sweet, white pillow. With
the beginning of day began also the demands upon the time of Miss Chris.
First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the
crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go
to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a
pessimistic head.

"Lawd, Miss Chris, one er dem ole coons done eat up er hull pa'cel er
yo' chickens." And Miss Chris, at once the prop and the mainstay of the
Battle fortunes, would rise with anxious exclamations and put on her
full black skirt and linen sacque