empt and ugly, run wild in straggling ailanthus shoots and littered
with chips from the wood-pile.

As he entered the house he saw his stepmother placing a dish of fried
bacon upon the table, which was covered with a "watered" oilcloth of a
bright walnut tint. At her back stood Sarah Jane with a plate of corn
bread in one hand and a glass pitcher containing buttermilk in the
other. She was a slight, flaxen-haired child, with wizened features and
sore, red eyelids.

As his stepmother caught sight of him she stopped on her way to the
stove and surveyed him with sharp but not unkindly eyes.

"You've been takin' your time 'bout comin' home," she remarked, "an' I
reckon you're powerful hungry. You can sit down if you want to."

She was long and lean and withered, with a chronic facial neuralgia,
which gave her an irritable expression and a querulous voice. For the
past several years Nicholas had never seen her without a large cotton
handkerchief bound tightly about her face. She had been the boy's aunt
before she married his father, and her affection for him was proved by
her allowing no one to harry him except herself.

"How's your face, ma?" asked Nicholas with the indifference of habit as
he took his seat at the table, while Sarah Jane went to the door to call
her father. When Burr came in the inquiry was repeated.

"Face any easier, Marthy?" It was a form that had been gone through
with at every meal since the malady began, and Marthy Burr, while she
deplored its insincerity, would have resented its omission.

"Don't you all trouble 'bout my neuralgy," she returned with resigned
exasperation as she stood up to pour the coffee out of the large tin
boiler. "It's mine, an' I've borne worse things, I reckon, which ain't
sayin' that 'tain't near to takin' my head off."

Amos Burr drank his coffee without replying, the perspiration standing
in drops on his large, freckled face and shining on his heavy eyebrows.
Presently he looked at Nicholas, who was eating abstractedly, his gaze
on his plate.

"I got that thar piece of land broke to-day," he said, "an' I reckon you
can take the one-horse harrow and go over it to-morrow. Them peanuts
ought to hev' been in the ground two weeks ago--"

"They ain't hulled yet," interrupted his wife. "Sairy Jane ain't done
more'n half of 'em. She and Nick can do the balance after supper. Hurry
up, Sairy Jane, and get through. Nannie, don't you touch another slice
of that middlin'. You'