ered hurriedly and hardly aware of what I was saying;
"but I want to know where he came from, please, Uncle Cradd."

"Well, as near as I can remember he came out of the woods a year ago and
has been in and out helping about the farms here in Harpeth Valley ever
since. He never eats or sleeps anywhere, and he's a kind of wizard with
animals, they say. And, William, he does know his Horace. Just last week he
appeared with a little leather-covered volume, and for four mortal hours
we--"

"They says dat red-haided peckerwoods goes to the devil on Fridays, and
Mas' Adam he cured my hawgs with nothing but a sack full of green cabbage
heads in January, he did," said Rufus, as he rolled his big black eyes and
mysteriously shook his old head with its white kinks. "No physic a-tall,
jest cabbage and a few turnips mixed in the mash. Yes, m'm, dey does go to
the devil of a Friday, red-haided peckerwoods, dey does."

"By the way, Cradd, I want you to see a little volume of the Odes I picked
up in London last year. The dealer was a robber, and my dealer didn't want
me to buy, but I thought of that time you and I--"

"Not one of the Cantridge edition?"

"Yes, and I want you--"

During all the rest of supper I sat and communed with my own self while
father and Uncle Cradd banqueted with the Immortals.

Even after we went back into the low-ceilinged old living-room, which was
now lighted by two candles placed close together on a wonderful old
mahogany table before the fire, one of the dignified chairs drawn up on
each side, with my low seat between, I was busily mapping out a course of
action that was to begin with my dawn signal.

"I'd like to get into the--trunk as soon as possible. There is something I
want to look up in my chicken book," I said before I seated myself in the
midst of one of the battles that raged around Ilium.

"Nancy, my dear, you will find that Rufus has arranged your Grandmother
Craddock's room for you, and Mary Beesley came over to see that all was in
order," said Uncle Cradd, coming and taking my face into his long, lean old
hands. "God bless you, my dear, and keep you in His care here in the home
of your forefathers. Good-night!" After an absent-minded kiss from father I
was dismissed with a Sanskrit blessing from somewhere in the valley of the
Euphrates up into my bedroom in the valley of Old Harpeth.

If I had discovered the shadow of tradition in the rest of the old house, I
walked into the very de