again, half fascinated, half amused to greet her; "I'se seen 'em, I'se
heard 'em, 'cause my mammy is a witch."

The boy would sit and watch her wonderingly as she lay curled along the
low branch of the mighty oak, clinging with little curved limbs and
flying fingers. Possessed by the spirit of her vision, she would chant,
low-voiced, tremulous, mischievous:

"One night a devil come to me on blue fire out of a big red flower that
grows in the south swamp; he was tall and big and strong as anything,
and when he spoke the trees shook and the stars fell. Even mammy was
afeared; and it takes a lot to make mammy afeared, 'cause she's a witch
and can conjure. He said, 'I'll come when you die--I'll come when you
die, and take the conjure off you,' and then he went away on a big
fire."

"Shucks!" the boy would say, trying to express scornful disbelief when,
in truth, he was awed and doubtful. Always he would glance involuntarily
back along the path behind him. Then her low birdlike laughter would
rise and ring through the trees.

So passed a year, and there came the time when her wayward teasing and
the almost painful thrill of her tale-telling nettled him and drove him
away. For long months he did not meet her, until one day he saw her deep
eyes fixed longingly upon him from a thicket in the swamp. He went and
greeted her. But she said no word, sitting nested among the greenwood
with passionate, proud silence, until he had sued long for peace; then
in sudden new friendship she had taken his hand and led him through the
swamp, showing him all the beauty of her swamp-world--great shadowy oaks
and limpid pools, lone, naked trees and sweet flowers; the whispering