uish between the calls of the earth-ling and the winged voyager
of the empyreal air. None of them had ever heard of ventriloquism, so
limited had been their education and experience, so sequestered was
their home amidst the wilderness of the mountains. Only very gradually
to Brent himself came the consciousness of his unique gift, as from
imitation he progressed to causing a silent bird to seem to sing. The
strangeness of the experience frightened him at first, but with each
experiment he had grown more confident, more skilled, until at length he
found that he could throw a singularly articulate voice into the jaws
of the old plow-horse, while his brothers, accustomed to his queer vocal
tricks, were convulsed with laughter at the bizarre quadrupedal views
of life thus elicited. This development of proficiency, however,
was recent, and until the incident at the bran dance it had not been
exercised beyond the limits of their secluded home. It had revealed new
possibilities to the young ventriloquist and he looked at once agitated,
excited, and triumphant when late that afternoon he appeared suddenly at
the rail fence about the door-yard of Valeria Clee's home on one of the
spurs of Chilhowee Mountain. It was no such home as his--lacking all the
evidence of rude comfort and coarse plenty that reigned there--and in
its tumbledown disrepair it had an aspect of dispirited helplessness.
Here Valeria, an orphan from her infancy, dwelt with her father's
parents, who always of small means had become yearly a more precarious
support. The ancient grandmother was sunken in many infirmities, and the
household tasks had all fallen to the lot of Valeria. Latterly a stroke
of paralysis had given old man Clee an awful annotation on the chapter
of age and poverty upon which he was entering, and his little farm was
fast growing up in brambles.

"But 't ain't no differ, gran Mad," Valeria often sought to reassure
him. "I'll work some way out."

And when he would irritably flout the possibility that she could do
aught to materially avert disaster she was wont to protest: "You jes'
watch _me. I'll_ find out some way. I be ez knowin' ez any old _owel_."

Despite her slender physique and her recurrent heavy tasks the drear
doom of poverty with its multiform menace had cast no shadow on her
ethereal face, and her pensive dark gray eyes were full of serene
light as she met the visitor at the bars. A glimmer of mirth began to
scintillate beneath