double log-house on the corner. I remembered the broken,
blighted family that used to live there. The strong, hard face
of the mother, with its wilderness of hair, rose before me.
She had driven her husband away, and while I taught school a
strange man lived there, big and jovial, and people talked. I
felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come to naught from such
a home. But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy farmer in
Smith County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared
for little 'Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her. A
hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at
because he was homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon,
an impudent old skinflint, who had definite notions about
"niggers," and hired Ben a summer and would not pay him.
Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in
broad daylight went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard-
fisted farmer set upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a
beast. Doc Burke saved a murder and a lynching that day.

The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impa-
tience seized me to know who won in the battle, Doc or the
seventy-five acres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out
of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I hurried on, thinking of
the Burkes. They used to have a certain magnificent barba-
rism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, never
immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconven-
tionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back,
and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn
Neill boys. It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy
farm-hands. I saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert,
with his stooping shoulders, had passed from the world. Then