sked demurely, smiling at him
from the depths of her white bonnet. "I fear you will not have time to
make a complete inventory of all the freckles, needle-pricks and
bruises; besides, it is some time since I heard voices, and we are far
from the meeting-house. Uncle Hiram would think it no light offense to
be late at afternoon service--and there is Betsy yonder by the big oak
on the hill, waving and beckoning frantically. Let us join her at
once."

"Yes, we must hasten," assented Dudley, consulting his big silver
watch, after thrusting his wet handkerchief into the bosom of his coat.

David Purviance, a young licentiate awaiting ordination at the next
session of presbytery, preached the afternoon sermon, and handled his
theme, "The Final Perseverance of the Saints," in a masterly manner.
But Abner Dudley gave little heed to the discourse; for his thoughts,
stirred by the vision of the beautiful girl across the aisle, were
wandering in an earthly paradise.

Through the deepening twilight he rode home alone that evening in a
tumult of bewildered feeling, scarcely able to realize that only that
morning he had been on that same road with Henry and Susan; for in the
interim he seemed to have entered an entirely new world of thought and
feeling.

CHAPTER IV.

WINTER SCHOOL-DAYS

Soon beautiful, misty Indian summer had vanished before the stern
approach of winter. The chestnut burs had all opened; the wild
grapevines, clinging to fence rails along the roadside and twining in
drooping profusion over the trees in wood and thicket, had long ago
been robbed of their glistening, dark clusters of frost-ripened fruit.
The squirrels had laid in their supply of nuts; the birds had given
their last Kentucky concert of the season and had departed to fill
their winter engagements in the Southland; and the forest trees waved
their bare arms and bowed their heads to the wind that wailed a
mournful requiem for departed summer.

By this time the wheat had been sown, and the last shock of corn
gathered. The school forces were, therefore, augmented by the advent of
a dozen or more larger boys and young men, eager to gain all the
learning that could be compassed in the months which intervened before
early spring plowing and seeding would call them again to the fields.

In the icy gray dawn of these winter days the boy whose week it was to
build the schoolhouse fire, would resist the temptation to snug down
again in the soft