came with her huge pails of warm water.

Those fresh summer dawns of Eugenia's childhood became among her dearest
memories in after years. There were hours when, awaking, wide-eyed,
before the house was astir, she would rise on her elbow and look out
across the dripping lawn, where each dewdrop was charged with opalescent
tints, to the western horizon, where the day broke in a cloud of gold.
The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came
to her with unsuspected melody--a melody drawn from the freshness, the
loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric
ecstasy of dawn.

Then, with the rising of the sun, Aunt Chris would turn upon her pillow
and open her soft, brown eyes.

"It is not good for little folks to be awake so early," she would say,
and there would rush upon the child a sense of warmth and tenderness and
comfort, and she would nestle closer to her sweet, white pillow. With
the beginning of day began also the demands upon the time of Miss Chris.
First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the
crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go
to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a
pessimistic head.

"Lawd, Miss Chris, one er dem ole coons done eat up er hull pa'cel er
yo' chickens." And Miss Chris, at once the prop and the mainstay of the
Battle fortunes, would rise with anxious exclamations and put on her
full black skirt and linen sacque.

When breakfast was over Miss Chris went into the storeroom each morning