I _couldn't_ live without it."

"Woman, hold yer jaw!" Basil proclaimed comprehensively. Then, renewing
his explanation to Kennedy, "I kin see that I don't purvide fur my
fambly ez I ought ter do, through hatin' work and lovin' to play the
fiddle."

"I ain't goin' ter hear my home an' hearth reviled." Aurelia laid an
imperative hand on her husband's arm. "Ye know ye couldn't make more
out'n sech ground,--though I ain't faultin' our land, neither. We uns
hev enough an' ter spare, all we need an' more than we deserve. We don't
need ter ax a meracle from the skies ter stay our souls on faith, nor a
sign ter prove our grace."

"Now, now, _stop_, Aurely!--I declar', Jube I dunno what made me lay my
tongue ter sech a word ez that thar miser'ble benighted meracle! I be
powerful sorry I hurt yer feelin's, Jube; folks seekin' salvation git
mightily mis-put sometimes, an'----"

"I don't want ter hear none o' yer views on religion," Kennedy
interrupted gruffly. An apology often augments the sense of injury. In
this instance it also annulled the provocation, for his own admission
put Bedell hopelessly in the wrong. "Ez a friend I war argufyin' with ye
agin' yer waste o' time with that old fool fiddle. Ye hev got wife an'
children, an' yit not so well off in this world's gear ez me, a single
man. I misdoubts ef ye hev hunted a day since the craps war laid by, or
hev got a pound o' jerked venison stored up fer winter. But this air yer
home,"--he pointed upward at a little clearing beginning, as they
approached, to be visible amidst the forest,--"an' ef ye air satisfied
with sech ez it be, that comes from laziness stiddier a contented
sperit."

With this caustic saying he suddenly left them, the procession standing
silently staring after him as he took his way through the woods in the
dusky red shadows of the autumnal gloaming.

Aurelia's vaunted home was indeed a poor place,--not even the rude
though substantial log-cabin common to the region. It was a flimsy
shanty of boards, and except for its rickety porch was more like a box
than a house. It had its perch on a jutting eminence, where it seemed
the familiar of the skies, so did the clouds and winds circle about it.
Through the great gateway of Sunrise Gap it commanded a landscape of a
scope that might typify a world, in its multitude of mountain ranges, in
the intricacies of its intervening valleys, in the glittering coils of
its water-courses. Basil would sometimes sink i