far away, on six weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps
twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked. Some
of the window-glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay
mournfully under the house. I peeped through the window half
reverently, and found things that were more familiar. The blackboard
had grown by about two feet, and the seats were still without backs.
The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every year there is a session
of school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I
felt glad, very glad, and yet--

After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double
log-house on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that
used to live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its
wilderness of hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away,
and while I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial,
and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come to
naught from such a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy
farmer in Smith County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared
for little 'Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard
life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was
homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint,
who had definite notions about "niggers," and hired Ben a summer and
would not pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together,
and in broad daylight went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard-fisted
farmer set upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke
saved a murder and a lynching that day.

The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it
is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years.
So I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain
magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar,
never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an
unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back,
and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill
boys. It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands. I
saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders,
had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes' gate and peered
through; the enclosure looked