ly scanning the space before her, while a
baby's plaintive wail rose and fell within with wearying monotony. The
log cabin, set in a gall in the middle of an old field all grown up in
sassafras, was not a very inviting-looking place; a few hens loitering
about the new hen-house, a brood of half-grown chickens picking in the
grass and watching the door, and a runty pig tied to a "stob," were the
only signs of thrift; yet the face of the woman cleared up as she gazed
about her and afar off, where the gleam of green made a pleasant spot,
where the corn grew in the river bottom; for it was her home, and the
best of all was she thought it belonged to them.

A rumble of distant thunder caught her ear, and she stepped down and
took a well-worn garment from the clothes-line, stretched between two
dogwood forks, and having, after a keen glance down the path through
the bushes, satisfied herself that no one was in sight, she returned to
the house, and the baby's voice rose louder than before. The mother, as
she set out her ironing table, raised a dirge-like hymn, which she
chanted, partly from habit and partly in self-defence. She ironed
carefully the ragged shirt she had just taken from the line, and then,
after some search, finding a needle and cotton, she drew a chair to the
door and proceeded to mend the garment.

"Dis de on'ies' shut Ole 'Stracted got," she said, as if in apology to
herself for being so careful.

The cloud slowly gathered over the pines in the direction of the path;
the fowls carefully tripped up the path, and after a prudent pause at
the hole, disappeared one by one within; the chickens picked in a
gradually contracting circuit, and finally one or two stole furtively
to the cabin door, and after a brief reconnaissance came in, and
fluttered up the ladder to the loft, where they had been born, and yet
roosted. Once more the baby's voice prevailed, and once more the woman
went to the door, and, looking down the path, screamed, "Awe, little
Ephum! awe, little Ephum!"

"Ma'm," came the not very distant answer from the bushes.

"Why 'n't you come 'long heah, boy, an' rock dis chile?"

"Yes'm, I comin'," came the answer. She waited, watching, until there
emerged from the bushes a queer little caravan, headed by a small brat,
who staggered under the weight of another apparently nearly as large
and quite as black as himself, while several more of various degrees of
diminutiveness struggled along behind.

"A