thank you, sir; I've got to get across Paradise Ridge before sundown.
The lambs are dropping fast over at Plunkett's, and I want to make sure
those Southdown ewes are all right," he answered as he put my hand out of
his, though I almost let it rebel and cling, and took for a second the
Golden Bird's proud head into his palm.

"I'll be over at Elmnest before your--your 'good judgment' needs mine," he
said to me as softly as I think a mother must speak to a child as she
unloosens clinging dependent fingers. As he spoke he shut the door of the
old ark, and Uncle Cradd drove on, leaving him standing on the edge of the
great woods looking after us.

"Oh, I wish that man were going home with us, Mr. G. Bird, or we were going
home with him," I said with a kind of terror of the unknown creeping over
me. As I spoke I reached out and cuddled the Golden darling into the hollow
of my arm. Some day I am going to travel to the East shore of Baltimore to
the Rosecomb Poultry Farm to see the woman who raised the Golden Bird and
cultivated such a beautiful confiding, and affectionate nature in him. He
soothed me with a chuckle as he pecked playfully at my fingers and then
called cheerfully down to the tethered white Ladies of Leghorn.

CHAPTER II

As we ambled towards the sun, which was setting over old Harpeth, the
tallest humpbacked hill on Paradise Ridge, the Greek battle raged on the
front seat and there was peace with anxiety in the back of the ancestral
coach.

As the wheels and the two old gentlemen rumbled and the Bird's family
clucked and crooned, with only an occasional irritated squawk, I, for the
first time since the landslide of our fortune, began to take real thought
of the morrow.

"Yes, landslide is a good name for what is happening to us, and I hope
we'll slide or land on the home base, whatever is the correct term in the
national game that Matthew has given up trying to teach me to enjoy," I
said to myself as I settled down to look into our situation.

I found that it was not at all astonishing that father had lost all the
fortune that my mother had left him and me when she died three years ago.
It was astonishing that the old dreamer had kept it as long as he had, and
it was only because most of it had been in land and he had from the first
lived serenely and comfortably on nice flat slices of town property cut off
whenever he needed it. He had been a dreamer when he came out of the
University of Virgi