As she spoke, Elinor Wingate, who was just a tired girl in the
circle of Mother Mayberry's strong arm, let her great dark eyes
wander off across the meadow to where a dim rim of Harpeth Hills
seemed to close in the valley. Her glance returned to the low, wing-
spreading, brick farm-house, which, vine-covered, lilac-hedged and
maple-shaded, seemed to nestle against the breast of Providence Nob,
at whose foot clustered the little settlement of Providence and
around whose side ran the old wilderness trail called Providence
Road. And her face was soft with a light of utter contentment, for
under that low-gabled roof she was finding strength to hope for the
recovery of her lost treasure, without which life would seem a void.
Then for a moment she looked down the village Road, across which the
trees were casting long afternoon shadows and along which was
flowing the tide of late afternoon social life. Women hung over the
front gates to greet men in from the fields or from down the Road,
girls laughed and chaffed one another or the blushing country boys,
and the children played tag and hop-scotch back and forth along the
way.

"It's all lovely," she said again with a contented little sigh. When
she spoke softly there was not a trace of the burr in her voice and
it was as sweet as a dove note.

"Days like these we had oughter take the world as a new gift from
God," said Mother musingly. "It were a day like this I come with
Doctor Mayberry along the Road to Providence to live, and stopped
right at this gate under this very maple tree, thirty-five years
ago; and thirty of 'em have I lived lonesome without him. I had a
baby at my breast and Tom by my knee when he went away from us, and
I know now it was the call laid on me to take up his work that saved