my impetuous approach.

"Oh, Spotswoode!" in a voice that cracked and went to pieces as I ran,
"somebody has stolen my beet! You can tell father--"

A hot valve closed in my windpipe and shut out the rest.

Spotswoode's jaw hung more loosely; his eyes were utterly vacant.

"Ya-as, little Mistis!" he drawled, and slunk back into the stable.

"What do you mean, sir? Come back here, this minute!" called his master.

When he reappeared, he carried in both hands, extended, after the
similitude of a pre-historic monkey making a votive offering--something
dark-red and pot-bellied, and more immense than I had dreamed it could
look. A cluster of cropped leaves crowned it, a taper root, a foot
long, depended from the bottom.

"I done been dig it up fo' you an' wash it, dis ebenin', 'stid o'
termorrer," drawled my vindicator. "So's ter hab it all ready fur the
Fyar."

Mute and triumphant, I received it in a rapturous embrace, set it on a
bench by the stable door, and passed the hem of my muslin apron about
it. The ends just met.

"That's how I knew how big it was," I said simply. "Mother told me that
my apron was a yard wide. I measured it while it was in the ground."

The beet--and its history--went to the Fair, and a prize was awarded to
"_Miss Mary Hobson Burwell, For best specimen of Mangel Wurzel, raised
by Herself._"

[Illustration]

Chapter XIII

Two Adventures

[Illustration]

In a country neighborhood where half the people were cousins to the
other half, gossip could not but spring up and flourish as lushly as
pursley,--named by the Indians, "the white man's foot."

The gossip was usually kindly; sometimes it was captious, now and then
it was almost malicious. Everything depends upon the medium through
which the floating matter in the air is strained.

Cousin Molly Belle's best friends thought and said that she chose
judiciously in marrying the clean-lived, high-minded gentleman who had
loved her before she was grown and whom she loved dearly in return. Her
next best friends intimated that the most popular girl in the county
might have done better for herself than to take Frank Morton, as fine a
fellow as ever lived, but whose share of his father's estate was a small
plantation with a tolerable house upon it, a dozen "hands" and, maybe, a
thousand dollars or so in bonds and stocks. The girls she had
out-belled, the girls' mothers, and sundry youths to whom Mrs. Frank
Morton had given the mit