annoyance enough to secure
the man's promise to begin work next day, or he would have gained
nothing but the family's resentment for his pains. Already David had
learned that a sort of resentful pride was the last shred of
respectability to which the poorest and most thriftless of the mountain
people clung--pride of he knew not what, and resentfulness toward any
who, by thrift and labor, were better off than themselves.

He reasoned that as the young man had been Frale's helper at the still,
no doubt corn whiskey was at the bottom of their misery. This brought
his mind to the thought of Frale himself. The young man had not been
mentioned between him and Cassandra since the day she sought his help.
He thought he could not be far from the still, as he forded Lone Pine
Creek, on his way to the home of Hoke Belew, whose wife he was going to
see.

David was interested in this young family; they seemed to him to be
quite of the better sort, and as he put space between himself and the
Widow Timms' deplorable state, his irritation gradually passed, and he
was able to take note of the changes a week had wrought in the growing
things about him.

More than once he diverged to investigate blossoming shrubs which were
new to him, attracted now by a sweet odor where no flowers appeared,
until closer inspection revealed them, and now by a blaze of color
against the dark background of laurel leaves and gray rocks. Ah, the
flaming azalea had made its appearance at last, huge clusters of
brilliant bloom on leafless shrubs. How dazzlingly gay!

In the midst of his observance of things about him, and underneath his
surface thoughts, he carried with him a continual feeling of
satisfaction in the remembrance of the little farm below the Fall Place,
and in an amused way planned about it, and built idly his "Castles in
Spain." A bit of stone wall whose lower end was overgrown with vines
pleased him especially, and a few enormous trees, which had been left
standing when the spot had been originally cleared, and the
vine-entangled, drooping trees along the banks of the small river that
coursed crookedly through it,--what possibilities it all presented to
his imagination! If only he could find the right man to carry out his
ideas for him, he would lease the place for fifty years for the
privilege of doing as he would with it.

After a time he came out upon the cleared farm of Hoke Belew, who was
industriously ploughing his field for cotton