at night the fireflies were all about. And
outside the pine trees, all around the house, the tobacco grew and grew.
It grew so broad and high that the children might have played I-spy in
it,--only there weren't any children. There was only the boy, and he
hated tobacco. He was poor, and his father was a hard man. He had no
time to play or to learn--he worked all day in the fields like a hand.
He had to work like the men at the lower Quarter, like Domingo and Cato
and Indian Jim. He worked all the time. I never saw the sun get up, but
he saw it every day. In the long afternoons when it was hot, and we make
the rooms cool and dark, and rest with a book, he was working, working
like a friendless slave. And at night, when the moon rises, and we sit
and watch it, and wonder, and remember all the battles that were ever
won and lost, and all the songs that ever were sung, he could only
stumble to his own poor corner, and sleep, and sleep, with a hot and
heavy heart, and the blisters on his poor, poor hands!"

Major Churchill sank back in his chair and stared at his niece. "Good
God, child! whose words are you using?"

"Jacqueline's," answered Deb, staring in her turn. "Jacqueline told it
to me just that way, one hot night when I could not sleep, and there was
heat lightning, and she took me in her lap and we sat by the window. Are
you tired, Uncle Edward? Does your arm hurt? Suppose I finish the story
to-morrow?"

"No, I'm not tired," said Uncle Edward. "Finish it now."

"The boy," went on Deb, using now her own and now Jacqueline's
remembered words,--"the boy did not want to work all his life long in
the tobacco-fields, working from morning to night, with his hands, at
the thing he hated. He wanted books, he wanted to learn, and to work
with his mind in the world beyond the Three-Notched Road. The older he
grew the more he wanted it. And Jacqueline said that the mind finds a
way, and that the boy got books together, and he studied hard. You see,
Jacqueline knows, for when she was a little girl, she used to stay
sometimes with Cousin Jane Selden on the Three-Notched Road. And Cousin
Jane Selden's farm was next to where the boy lived. There was just a
little stream between them. There were no children at Cousin Jane
Selden's, and Jacqueline was lonely. And she used to sit under the apple
tree on the bank of the little stream and send chip boats down it, just
as Miranda and I do. Only she didn't have Miranda, and she was all