atch was lying in the cow-path on the side of the hill where
Ivy had dropped it.

Mammy was bending over, examining something at her feet. Five ragged
strips of pink calico lay along the floor, each held fast at one end by
a rusty tack driven into the puncheons. Ivy had grown tired of her
bondage, and had tugged and twisted until she got away. The faithful
tacks had held fast, but the pink calico, grown thin with long wear and
many washings, tore in ragged strips. Mammy glanced from the floor to
Ivy's tattered dress, and read the whole story.

Outside, across the road, Uncle Billy leaned over his front gate in the
deepening twilight, and peacefully puffed at his corn-cob pipe. As the
smoke curled up he bent his head to listen, as he had done in the early
morning. The day was ending as it had begun, with the whack of old
Mammy's shingle, and the noise of John Jay's loud weeping.

CHAPTER II.

It was a warm night in May. The bright moonlight shone in through the
chinks of the little cabin, and streamed across Ivy's face, where she
lay asleep on Mammy's big feather bed. Bud was gently snoring in his
corner of the trundle-bed below, but John Jay kicked restlessly beside
him. He could not sleep with the moonlight in his eyes and the frogs
croaking so mournfully in the pond back of the house. To begin with, it
was too early to go to bed, and in the second place he wasn't a bit
sleepy.

Mammy sat on a bench just outside of the door, with her elbows on her
knees. She was crooning a dismal song softly to herself,--something
about

"Mary and Martha in deep distress,
A-grievin' ovah brer Laz'rus' death."

It gave him such a creepy sort of feeling that he stuck his fingers in
his ears to shut out the sound. Thus barricaded, he did not hear slow
footsteps shuffling up the path; but presently the powerful fumes of a
rank pipe told of an approaching visitor. He took his fingers from his
ears and sat up.

Uncle Billy and Aunt Susan had come over to gossip a while. Mammy groped
her way into the house to drag out the wooden rocker for her
sister-in-law, while Uncle Billy tilted himself back against the cabin
in a straight splint-bottomed chair. The usual opening remarks about the
state of the family health, the weather, and the crops were of very
little interest to John Jay; indeed he nearly fell asleep while Aunt
Susan was giving a detailed account of the way she cured the misery in
her side. However, as soon as t