Over Paradise Ridge

d man's horse whose natural gait is running away when it is not asleep. Peter woke it up and it took the bit

e spools of the finest silk thread, ranging in shade from gray to lavender, to begin on a crocheted tie and pair of socks for him. Daddy was as good as gold to him and fell immediately into Judge Vandyne's attitude

going to stuff it. He am a insult to any respectable skil

and. But just as he finished the last two lines-those lines the magazine had called "as perfect in winged lyric quality as any lines in the English language could be"-the Byrd, whom Sam had

y! I

muslin dress just behind him jumped to her fee

d Byrd, who even in sleep held in one hand the handle of a full basket he had begged from mother, and in the other tightly grasped a sack in whic

honor of Peter, I felt sure-and watched Sam and the Byrd jog away in the wagon down Providence Road. "He'll make his mark on his generation yet, Betty. This is jus

I exclaimed, heartily, as I grasped his arm w

g back and forth on the gate. "It is so marvelous to have a woman respond to your every mood

actory to love a man with no variations. I cannot see why girls like to tremble and blush and chill and glow and get angry and repentant about

had nine political speeches and two roast pigs and a lamb. Peter came home pale, but we decided before we went to bed to let the hero

orris Carruthers, and he was so charmed with her that he

ine of a separation, Peter," I pleaded with h

a huge plate of hickory-nut butter-candy in her hand, and we all three proceeded to material nourishment. I left them for a few minutes while I went up to my room and took out Grandmother Nelson's book. I wanted to be sure that not a single thing would bloom before I got back to The Briers. Peter had insisted that

e fact that the double parlors in the old Bankhead house are sixty-two feet long and forty-six feet wide. The girls were as lovely as a bunch of spring blossoms, and Julia looked like the most gorgeous, pink, fragrant, drooping cabbage-rose as Peter danced with her again and again. I was so glad, because he is as t

our own self, Betty, and not let him

rful he is and how wonderful his play will be if you and everybo

into it without me," he answered,

as you promised. You know, Pink, you are an awfully interesting man in some ways, and I kno

at! Everybody does,"

t, not you, Pink," I answered, hurri

en," he again said, with

be stupid,

stupid

e shipping to France in time to save the lives of all of them and about ten men? I seem to have to speak to you in words of two syllables t

rst I saw a big red mule lift his hind legs in

heard the dance that Pink and I had been arguing out,

y had all been talking about in general. We were all spellbound, for it was a really exciting and tremendous recital,

erfect flame of excitement just as Pink threw his own body

as he glared at P

eter, laying his arm on P

on the steps in the starlight to get my breath while

and me all about how you cut out each little eye with some potato around it for moisture and nourishment while it takes root in the earth, and the Byrd had been especially interested in all the potato-peels ever since. He had almost worn the life out of Mammy begging her not to cut through any of the "little ones" with her knife until she had taken to boiling them whole. And as

nce. It was so out of sight that it might have come from the hollow log out on Ol

ame nearer the hedge I saw that a wagon and mule were drawn up in the shadow beh

's things, and I brought a load of new peas and ten dozen eggs at the same time, so I couldn't dress for the dance, or have time to dance if I did. Six seventy-five a barrel, and five barrels; how's

swallow hard to keep out of my voice the sentiment I knew Sam wo

is so pretty," he said, and of course it couldn't hav

e all the way from New York with a three-figured bill-I threw into the blue-jeans arms. And out on t

o, I must go now or never," said Sam as he shook me off when I clung and be

es him and disapproves of his farming is pathetic. Five miles is a long way for anybody that knows Sam to be separated from him, at least that is the way I felt as Peter slid and skidded and dipped me around while he told me how proud he was of my beauty and the lovely and worthy friends I pos

ooking up at the retreating stars. And as we walked up the steps he told me another struggle he had thought up for the hero to have with his

r's next of friends or first or-Good night!" I muttered,

r Vandyne's introduction into real life. He took it

limit of my endurance, and I sat and fidgeted with the wheel while mother and Eph packed us up with the inevitable basket for Byrd plus the also inevitable "little ones" that daddy somehow managed to find for him. These young were three small kittens, attended in their blindness by a black-and-white-spotted mother cat, all safely lac

er has seen all kinds of wonderful scenery all his life; but of course, there is none in the world anything like the Harpeth Valley. All the other in the world is either grand or placid or swept and garnis

y. "Look at that white-haired old grand dame in her frilled frock with the string of chickens following her a

eturn. "She is the fifth generation to live in that house, and the two kiddies are the eighth. H

seen such homes and furniture and people as I have f

ll," I answered as I again avoided a farm wagon and a negro driving

young, green loveliness around them, or the feathery buckbushes and young hackberries that were harboring all varieties of mating birds who were wooing and flirting and cheeping baby talk in a delightfully confidential and unabashed manner. Peter had become wildly absorbed in a brilliant scarlet cardinal that followed the car, scolding and swearing in the most pronounced bird language, all for no fault of ours that we could see, when we turned

m-house. Peter had got the old Crittenden house and all the others where he had been entertained in his m

ss-like voice from the barn up on the hill, while I could hear wil

e recovered himself, I sped aro

Now press the edges together and never mind the blood on your hands. Hold the halter, Mammy. You get that can of lime ready to dust it, Byrd." Thus in dirty, b

he other, though I couldn't quite make it. Over my shoulder Sam began to sew it across with a huge crooked needle, helping me push

together as Betty is doing. This is an awful long cut, but I can manage it, thanks to seeing Chubb sew up

over my shoulder, I would have gone down in a crumpled heap. Also I was stirred by one glance at Peter's lovely

gs, clad in his elegant idea of farming corduroys, at the exact angle at which Sam's we

e hot water ready to wash it when it is finished. Now, Pete, an inch farther along! Who

ars in his distress over the accident to his old friend, I quit the scene of the operation and fled to the woods

y away from the barn, I sought distra

f the ground? No, nothing can compare with it unless it is seeing whole rows of them bursting out into blooms and tassels and little pods and burrs. I felt extravagant and wanted to kiss the whole vegetable family in a way of encouragement and gre

and see what a lot of bold pepper-grass and chickweed were doing in their trenches. Without waiting to get my gloves from my bag in th

the hens peck?" asked the Byrd, anxiously, as he came and squatted beside

," I answered, from instinct

left her puppies to eat out of a plate?" he asked. He let the kittens slide to the ground, where they sprawled in their blind helplessness, while he began to tend

e in my throat as I cuddled his thin little shoulder in the hollow be

heart and eased mine. I've loved that "little one" since the day they let me hold him in my arms when he was only a few hours old and motherless. Examining him from heels to head had comforted Sam in his anguish and

from some time at the wash-bench, and Peter was likewise, only Peter was not the Peter whom I had brought from town that very morning. He was attired in a pair of Sam'

long ranks of slain weeds and then at his watch. "Pete and I are goin

arpeth Valley. The way Peter ate would have made the black beauty in mother's kitchen swell with jealousy until there were danger to her own black skin

nse. That ought to have roused my suspicions, but it didn't. I went on down to that pea-patch as innocent as a newly bor

of peas, which are making Sam's fortune. He got them in by working two days and all one night in a bright spell in mid-February, and nobody for twenty miles around has any, while he has more

he squatted at the head of a row between Peter and me, and we all began to pull at the beautiful gray-green vi

saw my own finish, a

was four rows ahead of us, and a quarter of a mile away, more or less. I had collapsed, with my tired legs stu

g so easily down the slope. "Now, Peter, we must go right along picking the peas. Sam must get th

ty, and I took it. I rose, looked with fear at the two men at work in front of me, and fled, basket and all. I stopped long enough to empty my full basket in one of the barrels that were already in the wagon; and as I climb

I called

ans

me to see Mother Hayes?" I asked in su

n clothes of civilization, so we purloined a fairly clean blue jumper hanging on the porch, while I left a note

, but I've broken dow

lef

TT

e Byrd for overnight

rrow. Poor Pet

morning mother's black beauty found my old grass basket full of

arter of a cent every

at home and both o

A

sprouting in your

ers

up my mind what to say about them, so I sent the Byrd home by Tolly, who was going to take Edith out to see how

you will, m

h spare, thi

TT

kinds of poetr

even if it included being throttled with a pea-vine, Tolly and Edith came into town

asped Tolly, as he fell f

ned Edith, with the affli

going to tell Sue and Billy and Julia and Pink. They are g

Come over to-morrow, Edith, and let's finish My Lady's Fan. I'm

" Edith wailed from the middle of the road as T

, and listened to my martyred friends' accounts of what Sam was doing to Peter. I also had a bulletin from Peter every day by the rural-delivery route. That is, they were in Peter's handwriting, but the

ar-beets and resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched, ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of it

weeded and dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and ha

ld look of rapture shot across his fac

tie up onions," he

his day-book, and in just one week his balance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in m

t old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?" he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blush peonies which had been g

if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectly good lawyer or bank clerk-or farmer-he w

ulders as I went with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green ocean of future food and be perfectly happy. "It'll fill dinner-pails and give babies mother's milk," said Sam, as he sat beside me and smoldered out over his crop. "The Commissioner of Agricult

understood and roughed my hair into my

ther in the front of Grandmother Nelson's book. Little did I know that simple action of pride in Sam would bring suc

came home in early April Sam has worked like two men, and maybe more. But his harvests certainly amazed even the oldest inhabitants, who had sat around at the cross-roads grocery and spat tobacco-juice at the idea of his farming by government books, with no experience. They cam

e his friendly pride in every successful test of Sam's work. And his own fat was getting packed on him at a rate that beat the record-breaking red pig down in the long, clean pens

that I think she ought to have appreciated the great thing in him more than she did. When the copy of the Review, with Peter's poem on the Ultimate, came, he read the whole poem to her while she embroidered an initial in the corner of a handkerchief for him. The next day she told me that she

, again began to feel responsible to the world for Peter's play; and I might have made the awful blunder o

She wants to go on with her head level with the moon, and Tolly wants to get married in November, and I think he is perfectly right. He hasn't any family, and he says Ed

andal because I wanted to buy that old mahogany sideboard that the Vertreeses had to sell when they inherited old M

roic to shock Edith down to earth again, or into opening her eyes as those kittens dadd

at I suggested, though neither he nor I knew what it was. "But what is your idea of a heroic deed that will pluck the ch

lover heroics I had ever heard of from runaway horses to the use of a hated b

the state? Not if I know myself," answered Tolly, with business indignation and an

id, limply, as I saw that none of the things that h

wered Tolly; and again his

stioned. I considered it my duty to get to the bottom

er! I've never got that near to her!" he exc

on the back to make me get my breath, and a sleeping m

do it by teleph

e. "I tell you what I am going to do. I am going to have my wire chief cut Edith's line and make me a direct connection with mine at about nine o'clock to-morrow morning, as

y Jessamine Ray for a week at nine o'clock to-m

at Central hear me? Not much

Go to her armed with your love, Tol

line goes into the trunk. Hope Judson won't have to run more than a mile of wire to make that connection." And with no more gratitude or good night than that Tolly went down the street wit

up between them both in a material and a sentimental sense, and also wanting to let Sam and Peter miss me sadly, I let quite

ad given me for my garden. There was also Byrd's basket from mother, and a pair of small alligators tha

e and swung me way out into the middle of my own clover-pink bed. It was starred with sweet, white

happened, Sam?" I exclaime

ght before last, and he wrote me a note. Mammy grubs him, and I haven't seen him since. I've paid the Byrd a half inte

, with awe and sympathy for Peter fairly

and watch them begin to cut wheat. It is one week ahead of time, so I can get all the harvesters and not a grain will be lost. They say it'll run sixty bushels to the acre. Think of that, with only a thirty-six

our way over the hill I told him about Tolly and Edith. Sam laughed; he

g me to the top rail of the fence, vaulted over it, and held up his arms to lift

ndamentals with a man that could break a wheat record and be attended by the agricultural envoys of the United S

I vaulted the next fence in fine style and landed among the Commissioner and Dr. Chubb and the tobacco-juice neighbors, who had come to see the output of the first book-grown acre. I did not speak again to Sam that day until he tucked in Dr. Chubb be

heezed the Butterball as I shot down the hill f

" I g

felt as if I ought not to let Sam rest under such a suspicion, and that I ought to tell him about Peter. But just then he launc

t is, I suppose Peter did, for not one glimpse did I or anybody else get of him. Sam says Mammy set his meals down in the doorway of the shack

retty well but his heels, which he came in three times to have me fix for him; and once mother a

s good to have Sam to myself for long, quiet, hot evenings out on the front porch under the brooding doves in the eaves above us. Sam never talks much but he listens to me,

e to take Byrd and Mammy and make a start in New York. Even with the best sort of a backing, it is always a ten-year pull for a youngster before he counts in the world. I could have sold The Briers, but I couldn't make up my mind to do it, and then while I he

ve honored Him," I said as

-you know! But for Him I must go on just the same and bear fr

s I hugged his arm against my breast.

in the fledgling's high treble. The biggest mule lurched up to the gate, and two figures took a flying leap from

to be sure that neither of the

d Peter as he reached out his arms

demanded, though, of co

wo acts I've sent him, and I am to go right on to New York with the third that I finished an hour before the wire came over from the cross-roads station. You'

ed Sam in his deep, kind, strong voice that steadied all our nerves. "I knew you'd

I felt as if I were being hurried through space w

again, as he held me close and Sam withdrew

u need her. She always does," Sam said, in a quiet voice th

rough the gate and up the walk. They had to be told, and they had to congratulate, and then mother c

ing the string-beans to be picked or the weeds in the parsnips. He said good night to everybody before he did to me, and then started to go with just the farewell word, hesit

clad little body hovered against my skirts, "you ain't going to no New Y

I'll have to!" I sobbe

damn Pete!"