persimmon-colored roads red with rutty clay; distant peaks and nearer ranges purple and damask green against the infinite arch of sapphire sky.

Natural groups of oak and elm, sycamore, ash and hemlock, dominated by towering pines, diversified the hotel grounds. Under their shade browsed the active, hardy cows from the neighboring dairy, adding either charm or terror to the landscape, according to the point of view. A boskage of rhododendron with dark satiny foliage, made an effective background for the whitewashed kiosk inclosing the sulphur spring, whose virtues occupied in great primer the major portion of the hotel circulars.

Here in the early morning, the colored nurses and their charges congregated to renew a daily strife:

"But yo' ma-a seh yuh mus' drenk um, honey-chile."

"You drink it for me, mauma," insinuatingly, with a sly, rebellious uplook; answered by a vigorous wag of a turban or cap.

"No' me, missy. Nebbah tek dat stuff inside a me. Nebbah ! No, my Lawd! No' lak spile aige dan anyting I ebbah see de w'ite

folks drenk befo'.

Hit pahse my comprehemshum huccome dey git dey own consent tuh swallah hit down. Dat it do!" "Well, don't you look at me, or I will never get it down either." The despised contents of the tumbler quickly disposed of in the shadow of a broad calico back-a performance repeated three times daily-soon produced a fine luxurious growth of grass about the kiosk, frequently pointed to as indubitable evidence of the virtues of sulphur water by unconscious parents, to the mystification of the elder Das. "Den w'at dey want it tuh grow inside dey chillun an' deirsef for. . . eh?" To the vast amusement and nudgings of the children and the more sophisticated younger colored women.

The Weldon girls were not told of their easy way to avoid an unpleasant prescription, and so followed their Da, Maume Dilsey, submissively to the Fountain of Youth the morning after their arrival. The other children looked askance at them with winks of joyous anticipation. Doris, the older girl, stood the shock of disgust and surprise with the fortitude of "ancestry" and the pride of sixteen years. She even declared the draught delicious as she handed the empty goblet to Dilsey,—then involuntarily pressed a handkerchief to her lips. But Fawn, the younger, made such a baby outcry over her glassful that a small boy, hitherto unobserved, on a bench near by, sniggered audibly. The child turned toward him imperiously. She was not

used to being laughed at. She was a delicate little creature with immense, dark-hazel eyes which she fixed solemnly upon the giggling boy, while a sudden wild-rose tint bloomed in each sallow cheek.

He was evidently not one of the "hotel people's children." A mere skeleton of a boy, in an amazing pair of clay-colored trousers held up over a blue-checked shirt by leather straps. These suspenders were so uneven that one trouser leg displayed a ragged fringe from constant contact with the ground, while the other, though originally shorter, was rolled up above the knee.

A limp felt hat, the shape and color of a decayed mushroom, was pulled over a shock of hair which stood out under it like straws in all directions. The boy's sunburned face was not overclean; in fact, he looked as if he had been made of dust and never would outgrow it. But his eyes redeemed his forlorn and common appearance, for not only were they arched by dark brows and fringed with darker lashes, but they were of a strange unusual sea-color, full of shifting lights of blue and gray and green,-bright in the clear light and deepening to black in the shade. They gave his elfish countenance a curious charm, and those who looked at him once always looked again.

Fawn went up to him and held out the glass of water with an imperious: "Drink it."

He wriggled and shook his head, lowering his eyes in an agony of shyness.

66

Hit air not fitten tew drink," he managed to blurt out. "Then why did you laugh at me?" demanded the indignant little girl.

He dug his clayey toes into the grass convulsively.

"I was a-laughin' at you uns fuh a-scroogin' up yore face. Hit look plum redicklous," he confessed desperately. "I reckoned ez how you was kinder dis' pinted. I 'lowed tew muhse'f you was boun' tew be, soon's I seed you-uns a-comin' down th' hill."

"Then why didn't you say, 'Little girl, hit air not fitten tew drink?" she asked with great severity.

He writhed in abject embarrassment, hanging his straw-colored head. "I reckon you-uns wanted to see me scrooge up my face," continued Fawn with relentless mimicry, "isn't that so?"

"Hit 'pears tew me you air right," he mumbled in hopeless dejection.

"Then you can drink the rest of this water," she returned decidedly, holding the glass to his reluctant lips.

He gulped it down, shutting his eyes hard. Fawn experienced an immediate and painful revulsion of feeling. She put a new five-cent piece on the bench beside him:

"There . . . you may have it. It is all I have with me. Maybe you can buy a stick of candy with it."

The boy looked wistfully at the bit of nickel. The water was so outrageous he thought he might accept it. He did not know how to express his feelings on the subject, but a bright idea occurred to him. He pulled a smooth leaf from the limb of the tree that waved just within reach, curled himself over the slats of the back of the bench and began to blow on the leaf, making an exceedingly sweet, flutelike sound.

Fawn was enchanted.

She hesitated a moment, looked him over daintily, then sat down on the bench, turned the ruffle of her crisply fluted white sun bonnet toward him and listened with glowing eyes of delight.

He piped several queer little tunes, keeping time with one foot. "Miss Fawn!" called Maume Dilsey sharply, looking around for her. "Come right along wid me an' go back to de hotel. I'se 'sprised and 'stonished at you, chile," she added in a low voice as the little girl ran to her.

"I was only listening to the leaf-music," said Fawn, coloring violently. "I want to stay and hear him play again. I will stand here by you."

But the boy had slipped away and was trudging down the road, piping on the leaf like a cricket that had learned to sing.

Two weeks after this the Weldons drove up the mountain near the hotel to find a country woman who had balsam for sale, as Doris wanted a "dream pillow." The afternoon was glorious. The winding road, white and hard from constant travel, revealed new scenes at every turn and was agreeably arched by superb trees that rose from great boulders on either side and diapered the path with dancing shadows. The sky, a profound and radiant blue, was piled to the zenith in the south with magnificent masses of cumulus, dazzling white, like Himalayan heights of Fairyland. The spicy odors of grain fields and of balsam forests penetrated the summer air that grew cooler with each steep ascent.

The trilling of birds, and all the indefinite and mysterious sounds of the woods, so fascinating to the dweller in cities, the voices of falling water, of rustling leaves, of wandering winds, the soughing

of pines and hemlocks, the murmuring of wayside vines and bushes, where slipped unseen the little habitants of the woodland, added a deeper charm to the landscape.

Presently, from all these inarticulate murmurings of Nature-the Great Mother crooning to herself in the full tide of the year-there arose a thin, high, piercingly sweet sound. The merest silver thread of melody, that seemed to hang suspended in the air.

"Oh, dadda," cried Fawn, who was on the front seat of the surrey beside the Judge, "do listen! That is the boy I was telling you about. The boy who plays on a leaf. There he is,-in that tree!"

She pointed to a pair of clayey legs dangling from a limb overhanging a chattering mountain stream, and stood up in her eagerness, clutching her father's arm.

"He is playing 'Sweet Dreamland Faces,' that waltz the hotel band played the other evening. Isn't it exquisitive? I mean the way he plays it. Do call him, dadda."

The Judge, nothing loth, drew rein in the middle of the creek where the shallow quicksilver runlet foamed and fretted over the glittering quartz of its pebbly bed; the horses sucked up the ice-cold water noisily, with deep breaths of satisfaction, champing at their bits, pushing their steel-shod hoofs into firmer positions.

"Hello, bubba," called the Judge, "can you tell us where Mistress Week lives?"

"Over yan," the boy replied bashfully, peering out like a hamadryad, letting the musical leaf fall into the brook.

"Can we drive there?" queried the Judge with a dubious glance at the road.

"I reckon you-uns kin hitch tew the fench a leetle ways up. This a-way." He dropped lightly from the limb, waded the stream and went before the carriage at a dog-trot, his longest trouser leg flapping wetly against his brown ankle.

"He looks like a scarecrow just escaped from one of these cornfields," said Doris with scornful amusement. Her mother put a soft hand on her arm.

"He is somebody's little son, Doris," she whispered, tears in her eyes.

Doris, all compunction at once, leaned to her and kissed her gently.

They stopped at a ramshackle rail fence with corners gay with milkweed and bright purple and pink flowers. Beyond was a log

cabin on a steep incline. Below them, far below, the corn waved,a green waterfall.

"Look," cried the little low-country maid, "the cornpatch fell down the hill, mamma. They must have had an earthquake here too."

Some spotted hounds came out to inspect the arrivals, agitated their pendulous ears and howled dolefully until the pack was in full cry. The boy disappeared and a woman came to the cabin door. Silencing the dogs with a broomstick laid on vigorously right and left, she advanced to the fence amid yelpings that punctuated the ensuing conversation:

"Howdy," she remarked affably, removing the snuffstick from the corner of her mouth and spitting energetically, "won't you-uns light an' hitch?"

We were

"No, thank you," replied Mrs. Weldon, smiling involuntarily at the grotesque invitation, "we came to buy some balsam. told at the hotel that you had some for sale."

"Bud!" called the woman, without moving.

The piper displayed himself in partial eclipse at the door. "Git them thar balsam pillers an' fetch 'em out yere."

She lounged over the fence, scrubbing her discolored teeth with the snuffstick, stolidly inspecting the visitors. Presently Bud came out, his thin arms clasping desperately a number of dark calico cushions in hideous patterns and colors.

"Hit air mighty sweet," said Mrs. Week, shaking one violently before handing it over the fence for inspection, "'pears like ever' one who comes yere fuh th' summer's dead bent on agittin' one of 'em."

"But this seems to be full of sticks," complained Doris, squeezing the pillow superciliously as if it were a cushion containing suspected needles.

"Hit air boun' tew hev some sticks in hit," expostulated Mrs. Weeks, as if astonished at the criticism, "they gits shattered orf arter yuh sleeps on hit a time er two."

"I would rather have mine 'shattered orf' before the pillow is stuffed," said Doris, "I don't want any sticks or trash in it at all.” "Hit air a pow'ful lot o' trouble tew get the balsam," replied Mrs. Weeks pointedly, "an' thur haint but one man 'roun' yere whut gits hit."