resembled lad and
lass. I thought so, at least, when first I saw her, coming to fetch
him dry feeting and a clean shirt. She had walked twenty miles to
bring them, through the woods, following our trail. And the way she
kissed the young man, aside, was, or looked to be, rather lover-like
than maternal. Afterward, on several similar occasions, I was much
struck by the _genre_ picture they made; the youth had the great black
eyes and black curling hair of his mother. The drivers used to chaff
the fellow unceasingly about Young Moll and the care she took of him,
all of which he bore silently, with a troubled, resentful eye; though,
otherwise, a great, noble-hearted boy, generous, and inclined to
jollity. Really, the rough fellows thought the more of the young woman
for this motherly affection and wealth of care for her boy. It was in
their uncultured faces, all the while their tongues belied them.

The "basket" was slung and ready. The gang on the other side were
gesticulating, with random tugs at the line. There was something
whimsical in the way the proposers of the project shrank the one
behind the other, with assumed bravado and covert glances at each
other's faces.

"I shall have to go myself!" Villate exclaimed, with his
characteristic French oath, "I will go myself, fat as I am!" when,
rather bashfully, as if afraid of giving offense, young Lotte said he
would go "if no better man wanted the job." There were at first
muttered "_non, nons_" of dissuasion in the crowd, but nobody claimed
the "job," and Villate was but too glad to get a man to go. In a
moment the young man had stripped to his shirt and red drawers, taken
his axe and stepped to the basket, but it was found to be insecurely
attached; and afterward several better modes of handling the line were
suggested, in all causing a delay of an hour or two.

And now, as if the birds of spring, just flitting past, had carried
the word, or some presentiment of evil had found its way to the
Peevy's mother, she inopportunely made her appearance. Rad Cates
privately touched my elbow and nodded back, up the bank. I then saw
young Moll standing partly in the cover of a shrub fir, a hundred
yards off, intently watching the gang and the extended warp.

Several of the men saw her, but did not look or notice her after the
first glance. "Parbleu! a pity she's here!" one said, and they closed
in about Lotte to prevent his seeing her. But the woman soon came
nearer, going p