up to a
comfortable feather-bed in the great loft. Long after everybody else was
asleep, I heard the poor little babe wailing pitiably below, and Blant
softly walking the floor with it, jolting it back and forth in his
chair, and trotting it on his knees before the fire. No wonder the
little creature suffered agonies after eating the things it got for
supper.

After breakfast in the morning, Nucky invited me to go for a walk. We
ascended one of the spurs of the mountain in the rear of the
house,--never have I seen a more beautiful site for a home than in that
hollow--and a third of the way up, on a small "bench," came upon what
appeared to be a play-village. Beneath spreading trees, were a dozen or
more diminutive houses, with latticed sides and roofs of riven oak
boards. Some were crumbling into decay, some new and substantial. The
one to which Nucky led me was still yellow. "Here's where Maw lays," he
said, almost in a whisper (I judge that one reason he finds it so hard
to speak of her is his feeling that he, or rather, her desire for his
education, was in a way the cause of her death), and I knew that this
must be the family burying-ground, and these the grave-houses once so
necessary for the protection of the dead from wild beasts, and still
surviving here in the customs of the mountain country.

Near the grave-house of his mother were three smaller ones, still good
and new. "Our three young uns betwixt Blant and me died of typhoid one
summer, about five year' gone," Nucky explained. China-asters were
blossoming gaily among the weeds about these grave-houses. "Maw she sot
'em there," Nucky said, "she liked to come here and rest a spell when
she was hoeing corn, and set with these young uns."

The tragedy of the life of Nucky's mother was brought forcibly before me
as I stood there. An eager-minded, loving-hearted woman, shut off from
all opportunity, the bringer of ten new lives into the world, laboring
and drudging as only these mountain women know how to for the sustenance
and clothing of her family, suffering constant anxiety as to the very
lives of her loved ones by reason of the family "war," and finally
having to go out into the darkness of death and bid them all
farewell,--surely it is a sad and tragic history.

As we turned away, Nucky added, "With them three young uns around her, I
allow she haint so lonesome as she would be all by herself."

"No," I said, "having her loved ones with her, she is happ