through the pines, don't see you with my eyes or hear you with my ears.
And when she paints you, it's nat'ril for a woman with that pow'ful mind
and grand idees to dip her brush into her heart's blood for warmth and
color. Yer smilin', young man. Well, go on and smile at me, my lad, but
not at her. For you don't know her. When you know her story as I do,
when you know she was made a wife afore she ever knew what it was to be
a young woman, when you know that the man she married never understood
the kind o' critter he was tied to no more than ef he'd been a steer
yoked to a Morgan colt, when ye know she had children growin' up around
her afore she had given over bein' a sort of child herself, when ye
know she worked and slaved for that man and those children about the
house--her heart, her soul, and all her pow'ful mind bein' all the time
in the woods along with the flickering leaves and the shadders,--when
ye mind she couldn't get the small ways o' the ranch because she had the
big ways o' Natur' that made it,--then you'll understand her."

Impressed by the sincerity of his visitor's manner, touched by the
unexpected poetry of his appeal, and yet keenly alive to the absurdity
of an incomprehensible blunder somewhere committed, the editor gasped
almost hysterically,--

"But why should all this make her in love with ME?"

"Because ye are both gifted," returned Mr. Bowers, with sad but
unconquerable conviction; "because ye're both, so to speak, in a line
o' idees and business that draws ye together,--to lean on each other and
trust each other ez pardners. Not that YE are ezakly her ekal," he went
on, with a return to his previous exasperating naivete, "though I've
heerd promisin' things of ye, and ye're still young, but in matters
o' this kind there is allers one ez hez to be looked up to by