en one o' them black folks git a
gredge against another an' go an' set down an' look stiddy at him in
his hut an' cuss him in his mind an' set there an' watch, watch, until
the other kind o' took sick an' died, all in a fortnight, I believe he
said; 't would make your blood run cold to hear gran'ther describe it,
't would so. He never done nothin' but set an' look, an' folks would
give him somethin' to eat now an' then, as if they thought 't was all
right, an' the other one 'd try to go an' come, an' at last he hived
away altogether an' died. I don't know what you'd call it that ailed
him. There's suthin' in cussin' that's bad for folks, now I tell ye,
Mis' Downs."

"Hannah's eyes always makes me creepy now," Mrs. Downs confessed
uneasily. "They don't look pleadin' an' childish same 's they used to.
Seems to me as if she'd had the worst on't."

"We ain't seen the end on't yit," said Mrs. Forder, impressively. "I
feel it within me, Marthy Downs, an' it's a terrible thing to have
happened right amon'st us in Christian times. If we live long enough
we're goin' to have plenty to talk over in our old age that's come o'
that cuss. Some seed's shy o' sproutin' till a spring when the s'ile's
jest right to breed it."

"There's lobeely now," agreed Mrs. Downs, pleased to descend to
prosaic and familiar levels. "They ain't a good crop one year in six,
and then you find it in a place where you never observed none to grow
afore, like's not; ain't it so, reelly?" And she rose to clear the
table, pleased with the certainty of a guest that night. Their
conversation was not reassuring to the heart of a timid woman, alone
in an isolated farmhouse on a dark spring evening, especially so near
the anniversary of old Captain Knowles's death.

V.

Later in these rural lives by many years two aged women were crossing
a wide field together, following a footpath such as one often finds
between widely separated homes of the New England country. Along these
lightly traced thoroughfares, the children go to play, and lovers to
plead, and older people to companion one another in work and pleasure,
in sickness and sorrow; generation after generation comes and goes
again by these country by-ways.

The footpath led from Mrs. Forder's to another farmhouse half a mile
beyond, where there had been a wedding. Mrs. Downs was there, and in
the June weather she had been easily persuaded to go home to tea with
Mrs. Forder with the promise of bei