nia ten years after the war, and it had been the tragedy
of Uncle Cradd's life that he had not settled down with him on the very
broad, but very poor, ancestral acres of Elmnest, to slice away with him at
that wealth instead of letting himself be captured in all his poetic beauty
at a dance in Hayesville by a girl whose father had made her half a million
dollars in town land deals. Uncle Cradd's resentment had been bitter, and
as he was the senior of his twin brother by several hours, he demanded that
father sell him his half of Elmnest, and for it had paid his entire fortune
outside of the bare acres. In poetic pride father had acceded to his
demand, lent the money thrust upon him to the first speculator who got to
him, and the two brothers had settled themselves down twenty miles apart in
the depths of a feud, to eat their hearts out for each other. The rich man
sought a path to the heart of the poor man, but was repulsed until the day
after the spectacular failure of his phosphate company had penetrated into
the wilds of little Riverfield, and immediately Uncle Cradd had hitched up
the moth-eaten string in his old stables and come into town for us, and in
father's sweet old heart there was never an idea of not, as he put it,
"going home." I had never seen Elmnest, but I knew something of the
situation, and that is where the Golden Bird arrived on the situation. The
morning after our decision to return to the land--a decision in which I had
borne no part but a sympathetic one after I had listened half the night to
father's raptures over Uncle Cradd as a Greek scholar with whom one would
wish to spend one's last days--the February copy of "The Woman's Review"
arrived, and on the first page was an article from a woman who earns five
thousand dollars a year with the industrious hen on a little farm of ten
acres. There were lovely pictures of her with her feathered family, and I
decided that what a woman with the limited experience of a head
stenographer in a railroad office could do, I, with my wider scope of
travel and culture, could more than double on three hundred acres of land
in the Harpeth Valley. Some day I'm going to see that woman and I'm going
to stop by and speak sternly to the editor of "The Woman's Review" on my
way.

"Mr. G. Bird," I began as I reached this point and I saw that we were
arriving in the heart of civilization, which was the square of a quaint
little old town. From a motor-car acquaintance, I kn