tray blossoms strangely shaped and
delicately pink. Sometimes a group of Negro pickers would chant
in rich voices as they picked. "Da cotton want a-pickin' so
ba-ad!" But it was astonishing to the Beechams to find how many
aches they had and how few pounds of cotton when the day's
picking was weighed.

Tired and achy as they were at night, though, they were glad to
find children in the next shack.

"Queer ones," Grandma called them.

"It's their talk I can't get the hang of," Grandpa added. "It
may be English, but I have to listen sharp to make it out."

Daddy trotted Sally on his foot and laughed. "It's English all
right--English of Shakespeare's time, likely, that they've used
for generations. They're Kentucky mountaineers, and as the
father says, 'a fur piece from home'."

It was through the eldest girl that the children became
acquainted: the girl and her toothbrush.

Rose-Ellen was brushing her teeth at the door, and Dick was
saying, "I ain't going to. Nobody brushes their teeth down here,"
when suddenly the girl appeared, a toothbrush and jelly glass in
her hand, and a younger brother and sister following her.

"This is the way we brush our teeth," sang the girl and while her
toe tapped the time, two brushes popped into two mouths and
scrubbed up and down, up and down--"brush our teeth, brush our
teeth!"

She spied Rose-Ellen. "Did you-uns larn at the Center, too?" she
asked eagerly. "First off, we-uns allowed they was queer little
hair-brushes; but them teachers! Them teachers could make 'em
fly fast as a sewing machine. We reckoned if them teachers was
so smart with such comical contraptions, like enough they knowed
other queer doings. And they sure did."

Thus began the friendship between the Beecham children and Cissy,
Tom and Mary--with toddling Georgie and the baby thrown in.
Cissy was beautiful, like Grandma's old cameo done in color, with
heavy, loose curls of gold-brown hair. Long evening, visits she
and Rose-Ellen had, when they were not too tired from cotton-picking.
Little by little Rose-Ellen learned the story of Cissy's past few
years. Always she would remember it, spiced with the queer words
Cissy used.

They had lived on a branch--a brook--in the Kentucky hills.
Their house was log, said Cissy, with a fireplace where Maw had
her kettles and where the whole lot of them could sit when winter
nights were cold, and Paw could whittle and Maw weave a coverlet.

"Nary one of us