w-boned old horse until
one-thirty Monday night. I had been watching down Providence Road for
him from my pillow ever since I put out my light at eleven, because Jane
had decided that it was our duty to go to bed early so as to be as fresh
as possible for the rally in the morning. She had walked to the gate
with Polk at ten and hadn't come back until eleven, so, of course, she
was ready to turn in. It was just foolish, primitive old convention
that kept me from slipping on my slippers and dressing-gown--I've got
the prettiest ones that ever came across the Atlantic, Louise de
Mereton, Rue de Rivoli, Paris--and going down to the gate to see him for
just a minute. That second he stood undecided in the middle of the road
looking at my darkened house was agony that I'm not going to put up with
very much longer.

Scientifically I feel that I'm thinking life with one lobe of my brain
and breathing with one lung. Still I made myself go to sleep.

Everybody believes in God in a different kind of way, and mine satisfies
me entirely. I know that the hairs of my head are numbered and that not
a sparrow falls; and I don't stop at that. I feel sure that my tears are
measured and my smiles are rejoiced over, and when I want a good day to
come to me I ask for it and mostly get it. There never was another like
the one He sent me down this morning on the first slim ray of dawn that
slid over the side of Old Harpeth!

The sun was warm and jolly and hospitable from the arrival of its first
rays, but the wind was deliciously cool and bracing and full of the wine
of October. It came racing across the fields laden with harvest scents,
blustering a bit now and then enough to bring down a shower of nuts or
to make the yellow corn in the shocks in the fields rustle ominously of
a winter soon to come.

The maples on the bluff were garmented in royal crimson brocaded with
yellow, the buck-bushes that grew along the edges of the rocks were
strung with magenta berries and regiments of tall royal purple iron
weeds and yellow-plumed golden-rod were marshaled in squads and clumps
for a background for the long tables.

Jane and I with Henrietta were out by the old gray moss rock at the
first break of day, installing Jasper and Petunia and a few of their
_confreres_. Jasper has always been king of all Glendale barbecue-pits
and he had had them dug the day before and filled with dry hickory fires
all night, and his mien was so haughty that I tremble