flowers in the yard, not a sound to
break the awful silence of the accompanying hills. It was as if life
died there long ago and left behind only the rickety skeleton of a house
as a mournful epitaph.

But inside, an old woman sat mending bags. She wore a gray calico slip,
tied in around the waist with her apron strings; both were ragged,
abominably soiled. Her hair was white; strands of it hung around her
neck from a little knot twisted tight on the back of her head. Her face
was ghastly white, wrinkled, toothless, but the pale blue eyes, rolling
wildly, senselessly, in the cavernous sockets, gave her an expression so
terrible that Selah started back involuntarily as she lifted her head,
stared at her, and went on with her mending on the ill-smelling meal
sack. This was the wife of Jake Terry.

The Terrys had had nine children. They all worked in the field. None of
them had ever gone to school. They were poor with a desperation of
poverty undreamed of even in the slums.

But Terry had a sawmill. At last when his sons were old enough to work,
he began to make money. The wife and daughters did the farming. Then,
quite inconveniently, Mrs. Terry took leave of her senses. She was
violent in her efforts to throw herself in the mill pond. She was sent
to the asylum and remained there three years--until she was no longer
violent. Then she was brought home, still witless, but able in a
mechanical way from long habit to do the things she had always done.
Terry thought that this was better than hiring some one. His children
had married or "run off" and left him. So the old wife went back into
the treadmill. She was obsessed with the idea of work. She would not
sleep. Sometimes she would spring out of the bed in the dead hours of
the night, kindle a fire in the slatternly stove, and "start breakfast."
She was always hurrying from one task to another.

"How do you do, Mrs. Terry?" Selah ventured, still standing in the
doorway.

"My hens is all dead!" cried the old woman.

"I've come to see you about something," Selah said, advancing.

"No, you ain't; nobody ever comes here. My children are all dead, too!"
she wailed.

"They are not dead, they are married," Selah said soothingly.

"My hens is all dead, and my children is all dead, and I'm dead, too.
Women don't live, you know, they jest work." This last in a low,
confidential tone as she stretched the wrinkles of her face into a
ghastly grin. "I've heard of you," she wen