her doubts,--and so
would you, if you had heard how it creaked under the load,--how they
piled in great straw panniers of apples: black apples with yellow
hearts,--scarlet veined, golden pippin apples, that held the warmth and
light longest,--russet apples with a hot blush on their rough brown
skins,--plums shining coldly in their delicate purple bloom,--peaches
with the crimson velvet of their cheeks aglow with the prisoned heat of
a hundred summer days.

I wish with all my heart some artist would paint me Lois and her cart!
Mr. Kitts, the artist in the city then, used to see it going past his
room out by the coal-pits every day, and thought about it seriously. But
he had his grand battle-piece on hand then,--and after that he went the
way of all geniuses, and died down into colorer for a photographer. He
met them, that day, out by the stone quarry, and touched his hat as he
returned Lois's "Good-morning," and took a couple of great papaws from
her. She was a woman, you see, and he had some of the schoolmaster's
old-fashioned notions about women. He was a sickly-looking soul. One day
Lois had heard him say that there were papaws on his mother's place in
Ohio; so after that she always brought him some every day. She was one
of those people who must give, if it is nothing better than a Kentucky
banana.

After they passed the stone quarry, they left the country behind them,
going down the stubble-covered hills that fenced in the town. Even in
the narrow streets, and through the warehouses, the strong, dewy air had
quite blown down and off the fog and dust. Morning (town morning, to be
sure, but still morning) was shining in the red window-panes, in the
tossing smoke up in the frosty air, in the very glowing faces of people
hurrying from market with their noses nipped blue and their eyes
watering with cold. Lois and her cart, fresh with country breath hanging
about them, were not so out of place, after all. House-maids left the
steps half-scrubbed, and helped her measure out the corn and beans,
gossiping eagerly; the newsboys "Hi-d!" at her in a friendly,
patronizing way; women in rusty black, with sharp, pale faces, hoisted
their baskets, in which usually lay a scraggy bit of flitch, on to the
wheel, their whispered bargaining ending oftenest in a low "Thank ye,
Lois!"--for she sold cheaper to some people than they did in the market.

Lois was Lois in town or country. Some subtile power lay in the coarse,
distorted bod