breast of Providence Nob, at whose foot clustered
the little settlement of Providence and around whose side ran the old
wilderness trail called Providence Road. And her face was soft with a
light of utter contentment, for under that low-gabled roof she was
finding strength to hope for the recovery of her lost treasure, without
which life would seem a void. Then for a moment she looked down the
village Road, across which the trees were casting long afternoon
shadows and along which was flowing the tide of late afternoon social
life. Women hung over the front gates to greet men in from the fields
or from down the Road, girls laughed and chaffed one another or the
blushing country boys, and the children played tag and hop-scotch back
and forth along the way.

"It's all lovely," she said again with a contented little sigh. When
she spoke softly there was not a trace of the burr in her voice and it
was as sweet as a dove note.

"Days like these we had oughter take the world as a new gift from God,"
said Mother musingly. "It were a day like this I come with Doctor
Mayberry along the Road to Providence to live, and stopped right at
this gate under this very maple tree, thirty-five years ago; and thirty
of 'em have I lived lonesome without him. I had a baby at my breast and
Tom by my knee when he went away from us, and I know now it was the
call laid on me to take up his work that saved me. When I got back from
the funeral and had laid the baby on the bed Mis' Jim Petway come
a-running up the road crying that Ellen, her youngest child, were
a-choking to death with croup. I never had a thought but to take his
saddle-bags and follow her, and somehow the good Lord guided my hand
amongst his medicines, and with what I had learned from him and Pa I
fought a good fight and saved the little thing's life, though it took
the night to do it. And in one of them dark hours a sister-to-woman
sense was born in me what I ain't never lost. A neighbor took Tom and
they brought my baby to me and I stayed by Mis' Petway until they
weren't no more danger. Next day it were Squire Tutt's first wife
tooken down with the fever and not the week passed before that very Sam
Mosbey were borned. We was too poor to have a doctor come and live here
and they was a doctor over to Springfield took up my husband's county
practice, so I jest naturally had to do the healing myself, only
a-sending for him in the worst cases. They was a heap of teethers that
summe