ome fast friends,--she deprecated
leaving her scanty store of possessions lest their dainty order be
disturbed by the Indian intruders in her absence. She dared not quit
Fifine, whom it was sometimes inconvenient to take, even though the
child's father was inside the stockade, lest she be kidnapped, so covert
and sly was their slipping in and out, for somehow they were never
discovered at the moment of entrance. Nevertheless, she treated her
Cherokee callers with such sweet patient courtesy that it is not to be
wondered that they came again and again. She gave them trifles that she
could spare, and a share of the seeds of vegetables which she had
brought with her, and this they received with real and unfeigned
gratitude, for the women were the gardeners among the Cherokees and the
tillers of the soil.

Odalie herself had that strong nerve of sympathy with the springing
growths of the earth that made every turned furrow of the rich mould a
delight to her. It was not work--it partook of the nature of a pastime,
wrought for the love of it, when following her husband's plough she
dropped the Indian corn and covered it with her hoe. She loved the
soft, tender, sprouting blades, as they put strongly forth; she loved
hardly less the quickly springing weeds even as she cut them mercilessly
away with her hoe. She loved the hot sun, and the clear, fresh wind that
came rushing down the rushing river, and the delicious delicate perfume
of its waterside ferns, and the cool, sleeping shadows in the dark
mysteries of the woods, and the solemnity of the great mountains on the
eastern horizon, and the song of a thrush in mid-air above it all. And
when the clouds gathered and came the soft, soft falling of the steady
spring rain, she loved the interval it afforded for the setting of
things in order within, and once more she and Hamish and Fifine and the
cat were congregated on the buffalo rug in front of the fire, which had
dwindled to an ember kept from meal to meal, to sort treasures brought
with them in the small compass of a buffalo horn,--seeds now, the seeds
of certain simple flowers, a bulb and a root or two,--the precious roots
of an eglantine and a clematis vine. And now that the chance of killing
frosts was overpast, Odalie and Fifine were grubbing much of the time in
the ground and Hamish often came and grubbed too. The seeds were sown
and grew apace; the bulbs and roots throve; the vines began to clamber
over the support of a