hat there feud. I say Creed Bonbright! Nothin' but a fool boy. He better
l'arn something before he sets up to teach. He don't know what he's
meddlin' with." All this with a pride in the vendetta as an ancient
neighbourhood institution and monument.

The office of the new justice never became, as he had hoped it would, a
lounging place for his passing neighbours. He had expected them to drop
in to visit with him, when he might sow the good seed in season without
appearing to seek an occasion for so doing. But they were shy of him--he
saw that. They went on past the little yellow pine office, on their
mules, or their sorry nags, or in shackling waggons behind oxen, to
lounge at Nancy Card's gate as of old, or sit upon her porch to swap news
and listen to her caustic comments on neighbourhood happenings. And only
an occasional glance over the shoulder, a backward nod of the head, or
jerk of the thumb, told the young justice that he was present in their
recollection.

But there was one element of the community which showed no disposition to
hold aloof from the newcomer. About this time, by twos and threes--never
one alone--the virgins of the mountain-top sought Nancy Card for flower
seed, soft soap recipes, a charm to take off warts, or to learn exactly
from her at what season a body had better divide the roots of day
lilies.

Old-fashioned roses begin blooming in the Cumberlands about the first of
May, and when this time came round Nancy's garden was a thing to marvel
at. The spring flowers were past or nearly so, and the advent of the
roses marked the floral beginning of summer. In the forest the dogwood
petals now let go and fell silently one by one through the shadowed
green. But over Nancy's fence of weather-beaten, hand-rived palings
tossed a snow of bloom so like that here they were not missed at all; and
the mock orange adds to the dogwood's simple beauty the soul of an
exquisite odour. Small, heavily thorned roses, yellow as the daffodils
they had succeeded, blushing Baltimore Belles, Seven Sisters all over the
ricketty porch--one who loved such things might well have taken a day's
journey for sight of that dooryard in May.

"Well, I vow!" said the old woman one day peering through her window that
gave on the road, "ef here don't come Huldy Spiller and the two Lusks.
Look like to me I have a heap of gal company of late. Creed, you're a
mighty learned somebody, cain't you tell me the whys of it?"

Creed, sittin