widening eyes.

Now that chest contained, besides a meagre store of quilts and
comforts, her own and her mother's clothes, the fewer garments of
the boys of the family being alternately suspended on the clothes-
line and their own frames. She resented the sacrilege of Rufe's
invasion of that chest. She turned on the saddle and looked around
with an air of appeal. Her mother, however, was down the hill
beside the spring, busy boiling soap, and quite out of hearing.
Tennessee gazed vaguely for a moment at the great kettle with the
red and yellow flames curling around it, and her mother's figure
hovering over it. Then she looked back at Rufe.

He continued industriously churning up the contents of the chest,
the lid still poised upon that head that served so many other useful
purposes--for the gymnastic exhibition involved in standing on it;
for his extraordinary mental processes; for a lodgment for his old
wool hat, and a field for his crop of flaxen hair.

All the instinct of the proprietor was roused within Tennessee. She
found her voice, a hoarse, infantile wheeze.

"Tum out'n chist!" she exclaimed, gutturally. "Tum out'n chist!"

Rufe turned his tow-head slowly, that he might not disturb the poise
of the lid of the chest resting upon it. He fixed a solemn stare on
Tennessee, and drawing one hand from the depths of the chest, he
silently shook his fist. And then he resumed his researches.

Tennessee, alarmed by this impressive demonstration, dismounted