there comes down a night over the hot, lush,
maturing Harpeth Valley which is like a benediction that sprinkles cool
dew on a thirsting heart. And now the morning was cool and brilliant,
with the sun evaporating the heavy dew in soft clouds of perfume from
the grain fields, the meadows and the upturned soil out where the
farmers were breaking ground after the first harvests. I felt strong and
calm and full of an electric energy, which I found I needed before I had
more than started my quest.

I put on my tennis clothes, snowy from collar to shoe tips, like the
trappings of the White Knight, and started to walk down into the
Settlement to find Martha. I intended to stop at Mother Spurlock's
"Little House Beside the Road," and some vague idea was in my mind of
having her dispatch a messenger to summons Martha to the interview I was
about to bestow upon her. That is not the way it all happened and I was
hot and dusty and sweat-drenched before I had been on my quest more than
a few hours.

Mother Elsie was not at home. The door to the Little House was wide
open, as it always is when cold or rain does not close it, and huge old
Tabby with one eye purred on the doorstep in the sun. A bird was nesting
in the wisteria vine above the door and her soft whirring bespoke an
interesting domestic event as near at hand. It did not in the least
disturb Tab, and I wondered at the harmony between traditional enemies
that I met on Mother Spurlock's very doorstep. I went in and drew myself
a drink of fresh cool water from the cistern at the back door, looked in
a tin box over the kitchen table and took three crisp tea cakes
therefrom. I picked up a half knitted sock from beside the huge split
rocker in the shade of the gnarled old apple tree, which was a rooftree
in every sense of the word, for it crowded close against the door and
hovered in the whole tiny house. Just before I left I put all the loose
change I had in my white linen skirt pocket in an old lacquered tea
canister which had a slit in it cut with a can opener, and that stood
on the shelf of the old rock chimney in the low living room. I had
never heard that canister mentioned by Mother Spurlock and I don't know
how I knew that out of it came the emergency funds for many a crisis in
the Settlement. Then last I picked a blush rose from the monthly bloomer
trailing up and over the window and laid it on the empty, worn old Bible
on the wide arm of the rocker beside a pair of hor