ful draught from Billy Little, and the result soon began to show
upon the girl.

Thus it was that Dic often went to see Tom, but talked to Tom's sister.
Many an evening, long after Tom had unceremoniously climbed the rude
stairway to bed, would the brown-eyed maid, with her quaint, wistful
touch of womanhood, sit beside Dic on the ciphering log inside the
fireplace, listening to him read from one of Billy Little's books,
watching him trace continents, rivers, and mountains on a map, or
helping him to cipher a complicated problem in arithmetic. The girl by
no means understood all that Dic read, but she tried, and even though
she failed, she would clasp her hands and say, "Isn't it grand, Dic?"
And it was grand to her because Dic read it.

Lamps were unknown to our simple folk, so the light of the fireplace was
all they had to read by. It was, therefore, no uncommon sight in those
early cabin homes to see the whole family sitting upon the broad hearth,
shading their eyes with their hands, while some one--frequently the
local school-teacher--sat upon the hearth log and read by the fire that
furnished both light and heat. This reading was frequently Dic's task in
the Bays home.

One who has seen a large family thus gathered upon the spacious hearth
will easily understand the love for it that ages ago sprang up in the
hearts of men and crickets. At no place in all the earth, and at no time
in all its history, has the hearth done more in moulding human character
than it did in the wilderness on the north side of the lower Ohio when
the men who felled the forest and conquered nature offered their humble
devotions on its homely altar.

So it came to pass that Dic and Rita grew up together on the heart of
the hearth; and what wonder that their own hearts were welded by the
warmth and light of its cheery god. Thus the boy grew to manhood and the
girl to maidenhood, then to young womanhood, at which time, of course,
her troubles began.

Chief among the earlier troubles of our little maid was a growing
tenderness for Dic. Of that trouble she was not for many months aware.
She was unable to distinguish between the affection she had always given
him and the warming tenderness she was beginning to feel, save in her
disinclination to make it manifest. When with him she was under a
constraint as inexplicable to her as it was annoying. It brought grief
to her tender heart, since it led her into little acts of rudeness or
neglect, w