he late hours and drowsy house.
COMPLINE At last, too tired, beside her bed
She fell asleep ... her prayers half said.

IN MEMORY OF L.H.W.

He began life characteristically, depreciated and disparaged. When he was
a white, thin, big-headed baby, his mother, stripping the suds from her
lean arms, used to inveigh to her neighbors against his existence. "Wa'n't
it just like that _do_-less Lem Warren, not even to leave me foot-free
when he died, but a baby coming!"

"_Do_-less," in the language of our valley, means a combination of
shiftless and impractical, particularly to be scorned.

Later, as he began to have some resemblance to the appearance he was to
wear throughout life, her resentment at her marriage, which she considered
the one mistake of her life, kept pace with his growth. "Look at him!" she
cried to anyone who would listen. "Ain't that Warren, all over? Did any of
_my_ folks ever look so like a born fool? Shut your mouth, for the Lord's
sake, Lem, and maybe you won't scare folks quite so much."

Lem had a foolish, apologetic grin with which he always used to respond to
these personalities, hanging his head to one side and opening and shutting
his big hands nervously.

The tumble-down, two-roomed house in which the Warrens lived was across
the road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren's voice was penetrating.
Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. The
ugly, overgrown boy, clad in cast-off, misfit clothing was allowed to play
with the other children only on condition that he perform all the hard,
uninteresting parts of any game. Inside the schoolroom it was the same.

He never learned to shut his mouth, and his speech was always halting and
indistinct, so that he not only did not recite well in class, but was
never in one of the school entertainments. He chopped the wood and brought
it in, swept the floor and made the fires, and then listened in grinning,
silent admiration while the others, arrayed in their best, spoke pieces
and sang songs.

He was not "smart at his books" and indeed did not learn even to read very
fluently. This may have been partly because the only books he ever saw
were old school books, the use of which was given him free on account of
his mother's poverty. He was not allowed, of course to take them from the
schoolroom. But if he was not good at book-learning he was not without
accomplishments. He early grew large for his age, an