"Sometimes I wish the time when I could turn him barefooted from May
to November had never gone by. But a-wishing they children back in
years is a habit most mothers have got in common, I reckon. When
he's away from me I dream him often at all ages, but it's mostly
from six to eleven I seem to want him. When he were six, with Doctor
Mayberry gone, I took to steadying myself by Tom and at eleven I
made up my mind to give him up."

"Give him up?" asked Miss Wingate as she raised her eyes from her
work. "I don't think you seem to have given him up to any serious
extent." And she smiled as she turned her head in the direction of
the office wing, from which came a low whistled tune, jerkily and
absorbedly rendered.

"Oh, he don't belong to me no more," answered his mother in a placid
tone of voice as she rocked to and fro with her work. "I fought out
all that fight when I took my resolve. I just figured something like
this, Pa Lovell had been a-doctoring on Harpeth Hills for a lifetime
and Doctor Mayberry had gave all his young-man life to answering the
call, a-carrying the grace of God as his main remedy, so now I felt
like the time had come for a Lovell and a Mayberry to go out and be
something to the rest of the world, and Tom were the one to carry
the flag. I seen that the call were on him since he helped me
through a spell of May pips with over two hundred little chickens
before he were five years old, and he cut a knot out of the Deacon's
roan horse by the direction of a book when he weren't but eleven, as
saved its life. That kinder settled it with me and the Deacon both,
though we talked it back and forth for two more years. Then Deacon
took to teaching of him regular and I set in to save all I could
from the thin peeling of potatoes to worser darnings and patches